Studies of Christianity

Creed and Heresies of Early Christianity

1. Ωριγενους Φιλοσοφουμενα η κατα πασων αιρεσεων ελεγχος. Origenis Philosophumena sive omnium hæresium refutatio. E codice Parisino nunc primum edidit Emmanuel Miller. Oxonii: e Typographeo Academico. 1851.

2. Hippolytus and his Age; or the Doctrine and Practice of the Church of Rome under Commodus and Alexander Severus; and Ancient and Modern Christianity and Divinity compared. By Christian Charles Josias Bunsen, D.C.L. In Four Volumes. London. 1852.

When a stranger knocks at the gate of the Clarendon Printing-house, and presents his petition for aid, the University of Oxford maintains its national character for good-natured opulence,—gives its money and signs its name, without very close inquiry into the case. The documents are really so respectable that there cannot be much amiss; and a venerable institution, well known to be fond of the house, cannot be expected to go trudging through the back-lanes of history, and exposing its nostrils in the purlieus of heresy, in order to identify a literary petitioner, evidently above all common imposture. So it supplies all his wants upon the spot, dresses him handsomely, and sends him out into the world as its worthy (though eccentric) friend, the catechist of Alexandria. The introduction, being left at the Prussian Legation, falls into the hands of no stay-at-home benefactor, but of one who knows the by-ways of human life, and has an ear for the dialects of many a place. M. Bunsen—as Oxford might have remembered—is not unacquainted with Egypt; and no sooner does he raise his eyes from the credentials to the person of the stranger, than he discovers him to be no disciple of the Alexandrine Clement; recognizes the accent of the West; is reminded of the voice of Irenæus; and, finally, being even more familiar with the Tiber than the Nile, detects a Roman beneath the mask of Origen. We do not in the least grudge the friend of Niebuhr the honor of a discovery which no one could turn to more effectual account; but every English scholar must feel mortified that the Imprimatur of our great Ecclesiastical University should appear on a title-page manifestly false; that the first reader should see at a glance what the learned proprietors had missed; and that their Editio Princeps of a recovered monument of Church antiquity should be superseded within a year or two of its publication. They are not principals, it is true, but only secondaries to the Editor, in the commission of this error: still, a lay bibliographer might reasonably expect, in resorting for aid to so renowned and reverend a body, that his own judgment would be kept in check; and their very consent to issue the work implies some critical opinion of its value, as derived from age and authorship. Whether they are called upon to adopt at once M. Bunsen’s proposed title-page, and substitute the name of Hippolytus for that of Origen, we will not say; but that the present title gives the book to the wrong author, seems placed beyond the reach of doubt.

M. Emmanuel Miller, one of the curators of the National Library in Paris, was the first to make himself acquainted with the contents of this work, and to appreciate their importance. Among the manuscripts under his care was one on cotton paper of the fourteenth century, which had been brought from Mount Athos in 1842, by M. Mynoïdes Mynas, a Greek agent employed by the French government to search the neglected treasures of that celebrated spot. The superscription, “On all Heresies,” was not inviting; but on turning over the leaves, some lines, unknown before, of Pindar and of another lyric poet, were found and copied; and the value of these excerpts being ascertained, M. Miller’s attention was directed to the body of the treatise containing them. The treatise had already been described, in the Moniteur of the 5th of January, 1844, as a Refutation of all Heresies, in ten books, but with the first three missing, as well as the conclusion of the whole; and he soon became aware, that, of the three missing books, the first already existed, and had been printed under the name of “Philosophumena,” in the editions of Origen’s works. Its very title is found in the manuscript at the end of the fourth book, and denotes that the portion of the work there concluded completes the sketch of philosophical systems, which the author prefixes to his account of ecclesiastical aberrations; and there are mutual references, backwards and forwards, between the printed book and the manuscript, which leave no doubt that the latter is a sequel to the former. The Editor, therefore, has very properly reprinted the “Philosophumena” as the commencement of the newly recovered work; which thus exhibits a regular plan, and consists of two parts, viz.: first, four books,—of which the second and third are lost,—expounding the Pagan philosophies, especially the Greek, from which, the author contends, the various heresies of Christendom are mere plagiarisms; then six books, containing an account, in an order prevailingly historical, of thirty or thirty-two heresies, supported by extracts from their standard writings, and wound up in the recapitulary book at the end by the writer’s own profession of faith. Now who is the author?

Not Origen; for, as Huet had already remarked respecting the “Philosophumena,” the writer speaks of himself in terms implying an episcopal position; and, in the ninth book, he gives an account of transactions in Rome, extending over many years, in which he was evidently an eyewitness and an actor. While the scene is thus laid at a distance from Origen’s sphere, and the date also of the personal matter runs back into his boyhood, the cast of the theological doctrine is wholly different from his; for instance, in a certain “Treatise on the Universe,” to which the author refers as his own, and of which a fragment is preserved, the penal condition of the wicked after death is said to be immutable;26 but Origen, it is well known, taught a doctrine of final restoration. Add to this, that no such work as the present is attributed to Origen by any ancient witness, and the case against his name may be regarded as complete.

The evidence which disappoints this claim narrows also our choice of others. The personal transactions to which we have referred took place at Rome, while Zephyrinus and his successor, Callistus, presided over the Christian community there, that is, during the first twenty years of the third century. We must, therefore, look for our author among the metropolitan clergymen of that period. Still closer is the circle drawn by the fact, that the writer largely borrows from the treatise of Irenæus on the same subject; and, though vastly improving on that foolish production, and copiously contributing fresh materials, betrays the general affinity of thought which unites the stronger disciple with the feebler master.

The problem then being to find a pupil of the Bishop of Lyons among the ecclesiastics of Rome, at the beginning of the third century, two names are given in as answering the conditions,—those of Hippolytus, a suburban clergyman, and of Caius, whose charge lay within the city itself. In order to vindicate the claim of the first, it has been necessary for M. Bunsen to prove that his locality is right; and that the “Portus Romæ,” of which he was bishop, was not, as Le Moyne and Cave had groundlessly supposed, the Arabian “Portus Romanus” of the district of Aden, but the new harbor made, or at least enlarged, by Trajan, on the northern bank of the Tiber, immediately opposite to Ostia. That he suffered martyrdom there, and was buried in a cemetery on the Tiburtine road, is generally admitted, on the evidence of Prudentius, who has left a poem describing his memorial chapel on that spot, and of a statue of him, seated in a cathedra, which was dug up there three hundred years ago, and now stands in the library of the Vatican. It is certainly perplexing to find Jerome avowing ignorance of the see over which he presided, if, for a quarter of a century, he was active at the centre of the Christian world; and not less so to discover in Rome itself, nay, in a Pope, or his transcriber, at the end of the fifth century, the impression that his scene of labor had been in Arabia; and under the influence of these facts it has been supposed that though, coming to Italy, he had fallen among the martyrs of the West, he ought to be reckoned among the bishops of the East. On the whole, however, the reasons preponderate in favor of his residence, as “Episcopus Portuensis,” within the presbytery of Rome. The title itself is an old one, still always assigned to some dignitary of the curia, and, no doubt, deriving its origin from the time when the Northern Harbor of the Tiber—of which in the ninth century, scarce a trace was left—was a flourishing emporium. The name of Hippolytus is associated by tradition with the spot; it is given, our author assures us, to a certain tower, near Fiumicino; and in the eighth and ninth centuries, a basilica of St. Hippolytus was restored at Portus by Leo III. and IV. An episcopal palace still remains. By acute and skilful combinations, effected with evidence scanty as a whole, and suspicious in every part, M. Bunsen has endeavored to reproduce the historical image of Hippolytus. His office of “bishop” implied simply the charge of the single congregation at Portus; the members of that congregation were the “plebs” committed to his supervision; the city or village in which they lived was his diocese. His vicinity to the great capital drew him, however, into a wider circle of duties. For while Rome itself was divided into several ecclesiastical districts, each of which had its own clergyman and lay deacons, the suburban bishops were associated with these officers to form a committee of management, or presbytery, presided over by the metropolitan. By his seat at this board, he was kept in living contact with all the most stirring interests of Christendom, which, wherever their origin might be, found their way to the imperial city, and more and more sought their equilibrium there. At a commercial seaport, his own congregation would largely consist of temporary settlers and mercantile agents, Greek brokers, Jewish bankers, African importers, to whom Italy was a lodging-house rather than a home; and by the continual influx of foreigners he would hear tidings of the remotest churches, and carry to the clerical meetings in the city the newest gossip of all the heresies. Possibly this position, with its opportunities of various intercourse, may have contributed to form in him the agreeable address, and faculty of eloquent speech, which tradition ascribes to him; and induced him to commence the practice of writing with studious care the homilies which were to be delivered in the congregation. At all events he is the first of whom we distinctly hear as a great preacher. His period extends, it is supposed, from the reign of Commodus (180-193) to the first year of Maximin (235-6); and so brought him into the same presbytery-room with five popes,—Victor (187-198); Zephyrinus (201-218); Callistus (219-222); Urbanus (223-230); and Pontianus (230-235); with the last of whom he shared, in the last year of his life, a cruel exile to Sardinia, and returned only to fall a victim to fresh informations, and suffer martyrdom by drowning in a canal. It cannot be denied that, in order to recover this picture of Hippolytus, and still more in order to fix his literary position, the materials of evidence have to be dealt with in somewhat arbitrary fashion, and their lacunæ to be filled by conjecture. Prudentius, for instance, is called as an historical witness, yet convicted of fable in much of what he says. His poem declares that at one time Hippolytus had supported Novatus in his attempt to close the gates of repentance against the Lapsi, but had been reconciled to the catholic doctrine before he died. He must in this case have joined in the opposition raised by Novatianus (in 251) to the election of Cornelius to the papacy, and have died in the Decian persecution, which continued till the year 257. Moreover, the painting seen by the Spanish versifier on the walls of the memorial chapel introduces us to so ridiculous a story, as only to show how completely the martyrological legends had already escaped all the restraints of history. In this fresco the mythical fate of Hippolytus, the son of Theseus, is transferred to the Roman presbyter: he is represented as torn to pieces by horses; while the faithful follow to pick up his limbs and hair, and sponge away the blood upon the ground. If the sanctuary exhibiting this scene received the martyr’s remains from their original resting-place as early as the time of Constantine,—and such is our author’s opinion,—into what a state of degradation had the history of Hippolytus sunk in three quarters of a century! And if already memorial painting could thus impudently lie, how can we better trust the statue, admitted to be later still? Yet this statue, on whose side is a list of the writings of Hippolytus, is appealed to in determining the martyr’s written productions, as the painted chapel in evidence of facts in his personal career. We fully admit the success of M. Bunsen in eliciting a possible result from a mass of intricate and tangled conditions, and presenting us with a highly interesting personage. But perhaps, as the venerable image of the good bishop has grown in clearness before his eye, and attracted his affection more and more, the very vividness of the conception may have rendered him insensible to the precariousness of the proof. Ecclesiastical fancy, in its unrestrained career, has torn his personality to pieces, and left the disjecta membra so rudely scattered on the strand of history, that we almost doubt the power of any critical Æsculapius to restore him to the world again.

At the same board of church councillors with Hippolytus sat another λογιωτατος ανηρ,27 the presbyter Caius; and as an urban clergyman, he would be more constantly there than his suburban brother, separated by a distance of eighteen miles. To form any living image of him from the scanty notices of him which begin with Eusebius and end with Photius, is quite impossible. In one respect only do the personal characteristics attributed to him distinguish him from the bishop of Portus. He was a strenuous opponent of the peculiarities favored by the Christians of Lesser Asia, and especially of the claims to prophetic gifts, and the appeal to clairvoyant skill, by Montanus and his followers. With one of these, by name Proclus, he held a disputation; from which Eusebius has preserved a passage or two, showing, in conjunction with the title, not very intelligibly assigned to him, of “Bishop of the Gentiles,” that he belonged to the most advanced anti-Jewish party in the Church, lamented the grossness of the popular millenarian dreams, vindicated the apostolic dignity of the Roman against the pretensions of the Eastern Christianity, and disowned the Epistle to the Hebrews. This feature in the figure of Caius, though constituting the distinction, does not, however, necessarily oppose him to Hippolytus, whose attitude towards the Montanists may not have been very different, but only less positively marked. Still the suspicions directed against the two men are of an opposite kind: with Hippolytus, the difficulty is to set him clear of sympathy with Montanism;28 with Caius, to prevent his being classed with its unmeasured opponents, the Alogi.29 And a report even reaches us, that among the Chaldean Christians there exists, or did exist in the fourteenth century, a controversial treatise of Hippolytus against Caius.30

Between these two men, so similar in position, and not, perhaps, unused to sharp argument face to face, springs up, at the end of all these ages, a rival claim to property in the “Refutation of all the Heresies.” The chief counsel for Hippolytus, besides our author, are the eminent Professors Jacobi, Duncker, and Schneidewin,—all, we believe, belonging to the Neander school of theology; and as the last two are about to edit the work anew, and probably to give it its final form, their opinion of its authorship may be expected to prevail. The other side, however, advocated by Dr. Fessler, is sustained by perhaps the greatest of living historical critics, F. C. Baur, representative of the much-abused Tübingen school. Into so intricate a question we might be excused for inviting our readers, had we anything fresh to offer towards its solution; but the chief impression we have brought from its study is one of astonishment at the extreme positiveness with which the learned men on either side affirm their own conclusion. A more equal balance of evidence we never remember to have met with in any similar research; and the faint and slender preponderance which alone the scale can ever exhibit, amusingly contrasts with the triumphant assertion, of both sets of disputants, that not a reasonable doubt remains. The leading points of M. Bunsen’s case are these. A work “On all Heresies” is attributed to Hippolytus, and in no instance to Caius, by Eusebius, Jerome, Epiphanius, and Peter of Alexandria, at the beginning of the fourth century. Such a book was still extant in the ninth century; for Photius, the celebrated patriarch of Constantinople, has given us an account of its contents in the journal and epitome of his studies which he has left us. On comparing his report with the newly discovered book, the identity of the two works is established in some important respects: the number and concluding term of the series of heresies are the same; they both of them include materials taken from Irenæus, while reversing his order of treatment. Further, in the newly found treatise reference is made by the author to other works of his, in which he has discussed certain points of early Hebrew chronology in proving the antiquity of the Abrahamic race. Now, Eusebius was acquainted with a certain “Chronicle” of Hippolytus, brought down to the first year of Alexander Severus; and such a chronicle, in a Latin translation, is found in Fabricius’s edition of Hippolytus, only that its list of Roman emperors terminates, not with the beginning, but with the end, of Severus’s reign. It has, however, in common with our work, a peculiar number of tribes,—viz. seventy-two, derived from Noah. Thus, the author of the “Heresies” and of the “Chronicle” would appear to be the same, and, according to Eusebius, to be Hippolytus. Lastly, both in our new work, and also in a book called the “Labyrinth,” written against some Unitarians of the second century, reference is made to a treatise “On the Universe,” which the author mentions as his own production. By printing a fragment of this last in his edition of “Hippolytus,” Fabricius has shown to what name all three should, in his judgment, be set down; and that they cannot be given to Caius is rendered evident by the occurrence, in the fragment, of certain Apocalyptic fictions inconsistent with his rejection of the Book of Revelations. Moreover, the list of works on the statue of Hippolytus includes a disquisition “Against the Greeks and against Plato, or Respecting the Universe.”

What can be said to weaken so strong a case? Two doubts at once arise upon it, which we find it by no means easy to set aside. Granted, Hippolytus wrote a book “On all Heresies”; is it the same which is now delivered into our hands? One medium of comparison we possess, enabling us to place the original and the present book, for a short space, side by side. The very Peter of Alexandria who is one of the early witnesses called on Hippolytus’s behalf has handed down to us a passage or two (preserved in the Paschal Chronicle) from the book which he attests, with a distinct reference to the place where they are to be found. We turn to the right chapter, and the passages are not there. Nor is it a mere want of verbal agreement which we have to regret; the same topic—the controversy about the time of Easter—is treated; the same side—that of the Western Church—is taken, in both instances; but the arguments are different, and so far irreconcilable, that no one who had command of that which Peter gives would ever resort to the feebler one which our work contains. With the dauntless ingenuity of German criticism M. Bunsen makes a virtue of necessity, and endeavors to convert this unfortunate discrepancy into a fresh proof of identity. He thinks that, in this and some other parts, our work is but a clumsy abstract of Hippolytus’s original, which the citations of Peter enable us to recover and complete. This, however, is a plea which, it strikes us, damages his case as much by success as it could by failure. For if the book presented to us by the Clarendon Press reflects the original no better than would appear from this only sample which it is in our power to test, it may indeed be a degenerate descendant from the pen of Hippolytus; but all reliable identity is lost, and the traces of his hand are no longer recoverable. The second doubt is this:—Is the work which Photius read the same that has now been rescued? Of the few descriptive marks supplied by the patriarch, there are as many absent from our work as present in it. The treatise which he read was a “little book” or “tract,” as Lardner calls it (βιβλιδαριον), a word which can scarcely apply to a volume extending (as ours would, if complete) to four hundred and twenty octavo pages. M. Bunsen cuts down this number to two hundred and fifty, by supposing Photius to have only the last six books, containing the historical survey, without the groundwork of the philosophical deduction, of the heresies. The curtailment, if conceded, seems scarcely adequate to its purpose, and appears to us a very questionable conjecture. The manuscript, stripped of the first four books, would want the very basis of the whole argument; and, if such a mutilation were conceivable, it is impossible that Photius should fail to observe and mention it; for the fifth book opens, not like an independent treatise, but with a summary statement of what has been accomplished “in the four books preceding this.” Again, Photius mentions the Dositheans as the first set of heretics discussed; whereas their name does not occur at all, if we remember right, in our work, and their place is occupied by the “Ophites.” M. Bunsen treats this as a mere inaccuracy of expression on the part of Photius, who meant, by the name “Dositheans,” to indicate the same “earliest Judaizing schools” that are better described as “Ophites.” The name, however, is so unsuitable to this purpose, that it would be a strange wilfulness in the learned patriarch to substitute it for the language of the author he describes. He could not be ignorant that Dositheus, Simon, Menander, were the three founders of the Samaritan sect, exponents of the same doctrine, if not even reputed avatars of the same divine essence;31 and if he had applied the name Dositheans to any of the heretics enumerated in our work, it would assuredly have been to the followers of Simon, who stand fourth in the series of thirty-two, and not to Phrygian serpent-worshippers, who commence the list. Further, the author whom Photius read stated that his book was a synopsis of the Lectures of Irenæus. In our work no such statement occurs; and the use made of Irenæus does not agree, either in quantity or character, with the substance of the assertion. And, lastly, the patriarch’s Hippolytus said “some things which are not quite correct; for instance, that the Epistle to the Hebrews is not by the Apostle Paul.” In our work there is no such assertion; and when M. Bunsen suggests that perhaps its place might be in the lost books, he forgets that, according to his own conjecture, these books were no more in Photius’s hands than in ours, and that he cannot first cut them off in order to make a βιβλιδαριον, and then restore them, to provide a locus for a missing criticism on the Epistle to the Hebrews. The identity of our “Philosophumena” with the treatise which Photius read and Hippolytus wrote, appears, therefore, to be extremely problematical.

One fixed point, however, is gained in the course of the argument, and gives an acknowledged position from which the opposite opinions are willing to set out. Whoever wrote the disquisition “On the Universe” wrote also our work. This fact rests on the assertion of the author himself; yet, if the author be Hippolytus, and our “Philosophumena” be his “Refutation of all Heresies,” it is strange that no list of his writings mentions both books: the catalogues of Eusebius and Jerome naming the “Heresies” without the essay “On the Universe”; and the engraving on the statue giving the essay “On the Universe” without the “Heresies.” How can we explain it, that these ecclesiastical writers, in knowing our work, did not know what is contained in it about the authorship of the other book; and that this book should have wandered anonymously about down to the ninth century, side by side with an acknowledged writing of Hippolytus, which all the while was proclaiming the solution of the question? We should certainly expect that the book of avowed authorship would convey the name of Hippolytus to the companion production for which it claims the same paternity; but, instead of this, it not only leaves its associate anonymous for six hundred years, but afterward assumes the modest fit, and becomes anonymous itself. Even if no previous reader had sense enough to put the two things together, and pick out the testimony of the one book to the origin of the other, are we to charge the same stupidity on the erudite Photius, who had both books in his hand, and has given his report of both? In his account of Hippolytus’s treatise, he nowhere tells us that it contains a reference to the essay “On the Universe,” as being from the same pen; and that he found no such reference is certain; for he actually discusses the question, “Who wrote the essay on the Universe?” without ever mentioning Hippolytus at all. Just such a reference, however, as he did not find in Hippolytus, he did find in another work, of which he speaks under the title of “The Labyrinth”; and, strange to say, it was at the end of the work,32 precisely where it stands in our “Philosophumena.” Who can resist the suspicion, that the anonymous “Labyrinth” of Photius is no other than our anonymous “Philosophumena”? This conviction forced itself upon us on first weighing the evidence collected by M. Bunsen, in support of his different conclusion; and we observe that it is the opinion sustained by the great authority of Baur,33 who even finds a trace in our work of the very title given by Photius; the writer observing, at the beginning of the tenth book, “The Labyrinth of Heresies we have not broken through by violence, but have resolved by refutation alone with the force of truth; and now we come to the positive exposition of the truth.” At all events, the difference of title in the case of a work having probably more names than one, is of no weight in disproof of identity. With this new designation in our possession, we may return to search for our book in the records of ecclesiastical antiquity; and we have not far to go, before we alight on traces affording hopes of a result. No “Labyrinth,” indeed, turns up in the literary history of earlier centuries than Photius; but a “Little Labyrinth” is mentioned by Theodoret,34 as sometimes ascribed to Origen, but as evidently not his; and from his account of it, confirmed by the matter which he borrows from it, we learn that it was a controversial book, against a set of Unitarians in Rome, followers of Theodotus. It so happens that the very passage from this tract which Theodoret has used appears also, with others from the same source, in Eusebius, only quoted under another title,—the book being called a “Work against the Heresy of Artemon” (who was another teacher of the same school in the same age). The extracts thus preserved to us are not found in our work; which, therefore, if it be the “Labyrinth,” is a distinct production from the “Little Labyrinth”; but they are so manifestly from the same pen, occupied in the same task, as to render it perfectly conceivable that the two books might receive the same name, with only a diminutive epithet to distinguish the lesser from the greater. Nor are we left, as Baur has shown, without a distinct assertion by our “great unknown,” that he had already composed a smaller treatise on the same subject; for, in the introduction to the “Philosophumena,” he says of the heretics, “We have before given a brief exposition of their opinions, refuting them in the gross, without presenting them in detail.” This shorter work would naturally treat of the particular forms of error most immediately present and mischievous before the author’s eyes; and if he dwelt especially on the doctrines of Theodotus and Artemon, it is just what we should expect from an orthodox Roman. This essay, on a limited range of heresy, would naturally be issued at first with the special title by which Eusebius refers to it. But if it led the author to execute afterwards a much enlarged design, to which, from its intricate extent, he gave, on its completion, the fanciful designation of “The Labyrinth,” he might naturally carry the name back to the earlier production, and, to mark the relation between the two, issue this in future as “The Little Labyrinth.” Photius speaks of the tract against the heresy of Artemon as a separate work from “The Labyrinth,”35 and says the same thing of the latter36 that Theodoret had remarked of the former, that by some it was ascribed to Origen. The result to which we are thus led is the following. Our newly found work is not Hippolytus’s βιβλιδαριον “On all Heresies,” but the book known to Photius as “The Labyrinth”; the author of which had previously produced two other works, viz. “The Little Labyrinth” mentioned by Theodoret, and quoted under another name by Eusebius, and the “Treatise on the Universe,” whose contents Photius reports. Whatever, therefore, fixes the authorship of any of these, fixes the authorship of all.

Notwithstanding, however, our threefold chance, we have only a solitary evidence on this point. Attached to Photius’s copy of the “Treatise on the Universe” was a note, to the effect that the book was not (as had been imagined) by Josephus, but by Caius, the Roman presbyter, who also composed the “Labyrinth.”37 In the absence of other external testimony, this judgment appears entitled to stand, unless the books themselves disclose some features at variance with the known character of Caius.

But, it is said, such variance we do actually find. For while our work expressly appeals to the Apocalypse as the production of John, we know from Eusebius that Caius ascribed it to Cerinthus, and, in opposing himself to Montanism, rejected the millenarian doctrine which is taught in the Revelations. This argument, we admit, would be decisive if its allegations were indisputable. It is curious, however, that the one locus classicus,38 from which is inferred the presbyter’s repudiation of the Apocalypse, is confessedly ambiguous; and the charge it prefers against Cerinthus may amount to either of these two propositions; that he had composed the Book of Revelations and palmed it on the world as the production of the Apostle John; or, that he had given himself the air of a great Apostle, and published accordingly some revelations affecting to be imparted, like those of John, by angels. According to this last interpretation, the work of Cerinthus would be a book distinct from our Apocalypse, written in imitation of it, and seeking to share its authority. The contents of the production are briefly described by Caius; but they present such a mixture of agreement and disagreement with our canonical book, as to leave the ambiguity unresolved. They affirm, that after the resurrection will follow an earthly kingdom of Christ, in which the lower nature of man will, in Jerusalem, be again in servitude to passion and pleasure; and that the number of a thousand years are to be spent in the indulgence of sense. So far as the place and the duration of the kingdom are concerned, our Apocalypse might here be referred to; but it has nothing answering to the description of a gross and luxurious millennium. Taking the passage in conjunction with the similar statement of Theodoret, that “Cerinthus invented certain revelations, pretending that they were given in vision to himself,” we think it unlikely that our Apocalypse can be meant; and conceive the indictment to be, that Cerinthus had put forth a set of apocryphal visions, in which he abused the style and corrupted the teachings of a great Apostle to the purposes of a sensual fanaticism. This is a charge which Caius might bring, in consistency with the fullest acceptance of the Apocalypse as authentic and true. It was not the doctrine of a reign of Christ on earth, not the millenarian period assigned to it, to which he objected in Cerinthus; but the coarse and demoralizing picture given of its employments and delights. In proportion to his respect for the real Apocalypse and its teachings, would he be likely to resent such a miserable parody on its lofty theocratic visions. His opposition to the Montanists in no way pledged him to renounce the eschatological expectations which they were distinguished from other Christians not by entertaining, but by exaggerating. If our work, in its notice of their heresy, passes by in silence this particular element of the system, and treats their claim to special gifts of prophecy with less contemptuous emphasis than might be looked for in the antagonist of Proclus, there is nothing that ought really to surprise us in this. It does not follow that, because in our scanty knowledge we have only one idea about an historical personage, the man himself never had another. Caius did not live in a perpetual platform disputation with Proclus; and either before that controversy had waked him up, or after it was well got over, he might naturally enough dismiss the Montanists with very cursory notice; in the one case, because they had not yet adequately provoked his antipathy; in the other, because they had already had enough of it.39

Nothing therefore presents itself in our work which should deter us from attributing it to Caius; and the more we ponder the evidence, the more do we incline to believe it his. This result is to us an unwelcome one; both because we know how strong the presumption must be against a critical judgment condemned by the masterly genius of M. Bunsen, and because he has really made us in love with his ecclesiastical hero,—has put such an innocent and venerable life into that old effigy, that after wandering with him about the quays of Portus, and entering with listening fancy into the Basilica40 where he preached, it is hard to return him into stone, and think of him only as a dead bishop who made a bad almanac. Should our readers have contracted no such ideal attachment, we fear that this discussion of authorship may appear as trivial as it is tedious. Somebody wrote the “Philosophumena,” and whether we call him Hippolytus or Caius, whether we lodge him on the Tiber within sight of the Pharos, or of the Milliarium Aureum, may seem a thing indifferent, so long as the elements of the personal image do not materially change. This utilitarian impression is by no means just, and indeed is at variance with all true historical feeling. But it is time that we should give it its fair rights, and turn from the name upon our new book to its substances and significance.

Many sensible persons are at a loss, we believe, to understand why this refutation of thirty-two extinct heresies should be regarded with so much interest. Is it so well done, then? they ask. Far from it: better books are brought out every year; and such a controversial argument offered in manuscript to Mr. Longman or Mr. Parker to-morrow, would hardly be deemed worth the cost of printing. Does it add materially to our knowledge of the early heresies? Something of this kind it certainly contributes; but the gain is not large, and will make no essential change in the conclusions of any competent historical inquirer. Is any light thrown by it on the authenticity of our canonical books? This can hardly be expected from a production of the third century; and M. Bunsen’s application of it to this purpose appears to us, for reasons which we shall assign, extremely precarious. Perhaps it supplies the want which every student of that period must have felt, and organically joins ecclesiastical to civil history, so that they no longer remain apart,—the one as the stage for saints and martyrs, bishops and books, the other for soldiers and senators, emperors and paramours,—but mingle in the common life of humanity. When we think how the author was placed, it is impossible not to go to him with an eager hope of this nature. He lived at the centre of the vast Roman world, and felt all the pulsations and paroxysms of that mighty heart. He witnessed the ominous decline of every traditional maxim and national reverence in favor of imported superstitions and degenerate barbarities. Under Commodus he saw the ancient Mars superseded by the Grecian Hercules, and Hercules represented by an emperor who sunk into a prize-fighter, and the administration of the empire in the wanton hands of a Phrygian slave, who was only less brutal than his master. In the midst of pestilence, which had become chronic in Italy from the time of M. Antoninus, and of which a Christian bishop could not but know more than others, the city was still adding to its semblance of splendor and salubrity; and the magnificent baths and grounds that were opened to the public service at the Porta Capena, with the multiplied festivities and donatives, attested how little mere physical attention to the people can arrest the miseries of a moral degradation. Nor could the Christians of that age be wholly without insight into the habits of the highest class in Rome, for, in that great colluvies of heterogeneous faiths, the caprice of taste, if not some better impulse, determined now and then an inmate of the palace to favor the religion of Christ; and the favorite mistress of Commodus, who ruled him while she could, and then had him drugged and strangled in his sleep, is the very Marcia whom our presbyter describes as φιλοθεος and at whose intervention the Christian exiles were released from their banishment in Sardinia. If he was at home when the excellent Pertinax was murdered, and cared to know what tyrant was to have the world instead, he was perhaps in the throng that ran to the Quirinal, and heard the Prætorians shout from their ramparts that the empire was for sale, and saw the bargain with the foolish senator below, who bought it with his money, and paid for it with his head. Caius and his people had reason to tremble when they saw in Septimius Severus not only the implacable conqueror who suffered no political opponent to live, but the worshipper of demons, the gloomy and fitful devotee of astrology and magic, pliant only to sacerdotal hate; and when the young Origen came to be their guest awhile, and told of the terror in Alexandria which had joined his father to the band of martyrs, the post that just then brought the news of the Emperor’s death in Britain would seem to take off a weight of fear; especially as one son at least of the two inheritors of the empire had in childhood been committed to a Christian nurse, and been said to shrink and turn away from the savage spectacles of the amphitheatre. They were doomed to be disappointed, if they had placed any hope in Caracalla, and to find that what they had taken in the boy for the nobleness of grace, was but the timidity of nature; the murder, before his mother’s face, of his only brother, and then of his best counsellor, for refusing to justify the fratricide, would soon make them ashamed of remembering that he had ever heard the name of Christ. It would be curious to know how the Christians comported themselves when the Priest of the Sun became monarch of the world, and seemed intent on dethroning every divinity to enrich the homage to his own. The grand temple on the Palatine, which he built for the god of Emesa, every passer-by must have seen as it rose from its foundations. And when the black stone was paraded on its chariot through the streets, and the elder deities were compelled to leave their shrines and attend in escort to the Eastern idol, or when the nuptials were celebrated between the Syrian divinity and the goddess of Carthage, and Baal-peor and Astarte succeeded to the honors of Jove, no Christian presbyter could fail to witness the gorgeous and humiliating procession,—renewed as it was year by year,—or to ask himself into what deeper abomination the city of the Scipios must sink, ere the catastrophe of judgment made a sudden end. The orgies of Helagabalus were more insulting to the elder Paganism of Rome than injurious to the new faith, which equally detested both; and the offended moral feeling of the city reacted perhaps in favor of the Christian cause, and prepared the way for that more public teaching of the religion, in buildings avowedly dedicated to the purpose, which was first permitted in the succeeding reign. The natural recoil in the imperial family itself from the degradation of the court tended, perhaps, in the same direction, and drove the astute Mamæa to seek, amid the universal corruption, for some school of discipline which might save the young Alexander Severus from the ignominy of her sister’s son. Whether from this motive, or from suspicion of the growing force of Christianity as a social power, she had sent for Origen, and had an interview with him at Antioch; and the Roman disciples had reason to rejoice that her intellectual impressions of their system should have been derived from such a man, and her political estimate of it formed in the East, where the crisis of conflict between the dying and the living faiths was more advanced than in the West, and afforded a less disguised augury of the result. From their fellow-believers trading with the Levant, or arriving thence, the pastors of the metropolis would learn the propitious temper of the young Cæsar and his mother; and would feel no surprise, when he succeeded to the palace of his cousin, that he not only swept out the ministers of lust and luxury, but in his private oratory enshrined, among the busts of Pagan benefactors, the images also of Abraham and of Christ. They could not, however, but observe how little the morals of the court and the wisdom of the government could now avail to arrest the progress of decay, and reach in detail the vices and miseries of a degenerate state. When they passed the door of the palace, they heard the public crier’s voice proclaim, “Let only purity and innocence enter here”; they visited a Christian tradesman in a neighboring street, and found him just seized by a nobleman whom he had dunned for an outstanding debt, charged with magic or poisoning, doomed to pine in prison till he gave release, and no redress or justice to be had. The Emperor who, gazing in his chapel on the features of Christ, recognized a religion human and universal, was the first under whom a visible badge was put upon the slave, and a distinctive servile dress adopted; the slave markets were still in consecrated spots, the temple of Castor and the Via Sacra; and if ever some captive Onesimus, recommended by letters from the East to the brethren in Rome, was brought to the metropolis for sale, thither must the deacon or the pastor go to find how the auction disposes of their charge, and learn which among the chalked feet it is that are “shod with the preparation of the Gospel of peace.” The commonwealth had never boasted of so many great jurists as in the age of Papinian and Paulus; but as the science of Law was perfected, the power of Law declined; and Alexander Severus, the justest of emperors, was unable to protect Ulpian, the greatest of civilians, from military assassination in the palace itself, or to punish the perpetrators of this outrage on popular feeling as well as public right. The three days’ tumult, in which this master of jurisprudence fell the victim of Prætorian licentiousness, our presbyter Caius must have witnessed; and countless other momentous scenes, during a generation painfully affluent in vicissitude, must have passed before his eyes; and had he but known of what value his reports would be to this age of ours, he would have said more of the life he saw, and less of the speculations he denounced. To us it would have been worth anything to know just what was too close to him to catch his eye;—how the Christians lived in such a world; what thoughts stirred in them as they walked the streets and heard the news; what happened and was said when they met together, and how this could adjust itself with the real facts of an inconsistent and tyrannical present; and how, as the corrupted State became ever more incapable of vindicating moral ends, the rising Church undertook the secret governance of life, and penetrated with its authority into recesses beyond the reach, not of the arm of administration only, but of the definitions of the widest code. But in this respect also our author fails to realize our hopes. He gives us a book of fancies rather than of facts, and instead of painting existence, which is transient, and must be caught as it flies, occupies himself in describing nonsense, which is always to be had. The enormities of Helagabalus, though staring him in the face, are nothing to him in comparison with heresy in Lesser Asia, which keeps Easter on a wrong day. He is shut up within the interior circle of the community of believers, and gives but a single glimpse beyond; and builds for us no bridge to abolish the mysterious separation of ecclesiastical and ideal from civil and real existence in the early ages of our faith. He is not peculiar in this defect. We all of us live in the midst of history without knowing it, and ourselves make history without feeling it; and that which will most clearly paint us in the thought of other times, which will seem our power to them, our romance and nobleness, with which, therefore, they will most crave to satiate their eye, is precisely what is least consciously present to us,—the natural spirit and daily spring of our common being, through which not the will of man, but the providence of God, works its appointed ends. At all events, the insight which we should be best pleased to gain into the life of the third century is not given even incidentally, except in the scantiest measure, by the “Philosophumena,” which we must rank, in this respect, below the Apologies, and with the writings of Irenæus and Epiphanius. The book is dogmatic and controversial, and the interest attached to it arises entirely from its being a register of opinion, a new witness to the thoughts about divine things, which the Christianity of its period owned and disowned. For those who care at all to know the state of belief a century before the Council of Nice, the work possesses a high value. But the worth of this sort of information is itself a thing disputed, at least its religious worth; and will be very differently estimated, according to the preconception which occupies us as to the nature of Divine Revelation, and the sources open to us for the attainment of sacred truth. Here it is that we find M. Bunsen’s great and peculiar strength. His religious philosophy, taken by itself, brings us occasionally to a pause of doubt. His historical criticism is not always convincing. But his doctrine of the relation between religion and history, of the mingling of divine and human elements in the theatre of time, and of the special agency of Christianity in the spiritual education of mankind, appears to us profoundly true and beautiful. This it is that makes him attach so much importance to the creed of the second and third centuries, and to the new light now thrown upon it; an importance which, from every ordinary point of view, can scarcely fail to appear fanciful and exaggerated.

The Roman Catholic, for instance, entertains a conception about what sacred truth is, and how it is to be had, which, leaving nothing to depend on new discoveries, discharges all the richest interest from any fresh knowledge we may gain of religion in the past. With him divine truth, so far as it is special to Christendom, is something wholly foreign to the human mind, intrinsically unrelated to any faculty we have. In being supernatural, it belongs to another sphere than that to which our thought is restricted, and is totally withdrawn from all the movements of our nature. It consists, indeed, in a set of objective facts from which we are absent, and which no ratiocination of ours can seize, any more than our ear can tell whether there be music on Saturn’s ring. There is no human consciousness answering to it; and to resort thither for it is like asking the dreamer or the blindfold to describe the scene in which he stands, or consulting your own feelings to learn what is going on in Pekin or Japan. On this theory, the objects of faith are conceived of as objects of perception, only by senses otherwise constituted than ours; we can have no surmise about them, till they are announced to us by qualified percipients, and no comprehension of them even then, but only reception of them as facts imported for us from abroad. The bearing of this doctrine of invisible realism on the treatment of ecclesiastical history is manifest. The inaccessible facts are deposited with the sacerdotal corporation; with whom alone is vested the duty and the power of stating and defining them. They are not indeed all stated and defined in their last amplitude at once; for definition is always an enclosure of the true by exclusion of the false; and it is only in proportion as the dreaming perversity of men throws forth one delusive fancy after another, that the Church draws line after line to shut the intrusion out. If the creeds seem to enlarge as the centuries pass, it is not that they have more truth to give, but only more error to remove. The divine facts were conceived aright and conceived complete in the minds of Apostles and Evangelists, but they were not contemplated then as against the follies and contradictions opposed to them in later times; but as soon as the hour came for this antagonism to be felt, the infallible perception secured in perpetuity to the living hierarchy supplied the due verdict of rejection. To the Catholic, therefore, Christianity was made up and finished, its treasury was full, in the first generation; its power of development is only the refusal of deviation; and its intellectual life is tame as the story of some perfect hero, who does nothing but stand still and repel temptations. The history of doctrines thus becomes a history of heresies; the primitive stock of tradition and Scripture must, on the one hand, be maintained entire in the face of all possible exposures by critical research; and, on the other, remain in eternal barrenness and produce no more. Natural knowledge, whether of the world or of humanity, may grow continually, but the new thoughts it may lead us to entertain of God are either not new, or not true; and every pretended enrichment of truth is nothing but evolution of falsehood. This removal of all variety from religion, this expulsion of life and change into the negative region of aberration and denial, eviscerates the past of its devout interest, rests the study of it on contempt instead of reverence for man; with all its pious air, it simply betrays history with a kiss, and delivers it over for scribes to buffet and chief priests to crucify. Short work is made in this way of any fresh witness, like the author of our book, who turns up unexpectedly from an early age. Does he speak in agreement with the hierarchical standards? He only flings another voice into the consensus of obedient believers. Does he say anything at variance with the regula fidei? Then have we only to see in what class of heretics he stands. His testimony is either superfluous or misleading.

The Protestant, of the approved English type, arrives, under guidance of a different thought, at the same flat and indifferent result. Though he gives a more subjective character to divine truth than the Roman Catholic, and brings both the want and the supply of it more within the attestation of consciousness, he puts its discovery equally beyond the reach of our ruined faculties, and equally cuts it off from all relation to philosophy and the natural living exercise of reason and conscience. He further agrees that his foreign gift of revelation was imported all at once, and all complete, into our world, within the Apostolic age; that the conceptions of that time are an authoritative rule for all succeeding centuries; and that every newer doctrine is to be regarded as a false accretion, to be flung off into the incompetent and barren spaces of human speculation. He denies, however, the twofold vehicle of this precious gift; and, cancelling altogether the oral tradition and indeterminate Christian consciousness of the early Church, shuts up the whole contents of religion within the canonical Scriptures. The guardianship of unwritten tradition being abolished, and the canon requiring no guardianship at all, the trust deposited with the hierarchy disappears; and no permanent inspiration, no authoritative judicial function, in matters of faith, remains. Whatever Holy Spirit continues in the Church is not a progressively teaching spirit, which can ever impart thoughts or experiences unknown to the first believers; but a personally comforting and animating spirit, whose highest climax of enlightenment is the exact reproduction of the primitive state of mind. The apprehension of Divine truth is thus reduced to an affair of verbal interpretation of documents; and though in this process there is room for the largest play of subjective feeling, so that different minds, different nations, different ages, will unconsciously evolve very various results; these are not to be regarded as possible Divine enrichments of the faith, but to be brought rigidly to the standard of the earliest Church, and disowned wherever they include what was absent there. This view is less mischievous than the Roman Catholic, only because it is more inconsequent and confused. The canon which you take as sacred was selected and set in authority by the unwritten consciousness and tradition which you reject as profane. The Church existed before its records; expressed its life in ways spreading indefinitely beyond them; and neither was exempt from human elements till they were finished, nor lost the Divine spirit when they were done. So arbitrary a doctrine corrupts the beauty of Scripture, and deadens the noblest interest of history. If the New Testament is to serve as an infallible standard, it is thus committed to perfect unity and self-consistency; and you are obliged to contend that the various types of doctrine found within its compass—the Messianic conceptions of Matthew and John, the “Faith” of Paul and James, the eucharistic conceptions of the first Evangelists and the last, the eschatology of the Apocalypse and the Epistles—are only different sides of one and the same belief, colored with the tints and shadings of several minds. How utterly inadequate such an hypothesis is to the explanation of the Scriptural phenomena, what a distorted and absurd representation it gives of the sacred writers, and their mode of thought, is best known to those who have honestly tried to deal with the fourth Gospel, for instance, as historically the supplement of the others, and dogmatically of the Book of Revelation; to suppose the Logos-doctrine tacitly present in the speeches of Peter; to detect the pre-existence in Mark, or remove it from John; or to identify the Paraclete with the gifts of Pentecost. All feeling of living reality is lost from our picture of the Apostolic time, when its outlines are thus blurred, its contrasts destroyed, its grouped figures effaced, and the whole melted away by the persevering drizzle of a watery criticism into a muddy glory round the place where Christ should be. If, moreover, we are to find everything in the first age, then the second, and the third, and all others, must be worse, just in so far as they differ from it; and the whole course of succeeding thought, the widening and deepening of the Christian faith and feeling, the swelling of its stream by the lapse into it of Oriental Gnosis and Hellenic Platonism and the Western Conscience, must be a ceaseless degeneracy. Thus to the Bibliolater as to the Romanist, Divine truth has no history among men, unless it be the history of decline, or of recovery purchased by decline. He also will accordingly care nothing about what the people of Caius or Hippolytus thought. Is it in the Bible? If so, he knew it before. Is it not in the Bible? Then he has nothing to do with it but throw it away. By a fitting retribution, this moping worship of the letter of a book and the creed of a generation brings it to pass that both are lost to the mind in a dismal haze of ignorance and misconception; and if the “Evangelical” believer could be transported suddenly from Exeter Hall into the company of the twelve in Jerusalem, or the Proseucha which Paul enters on the banks of the Strymon, or the room where the Agape is prepared at Rome, we are persuaded that he would find a scene newer to his expectations than by any other migration into a known time and place.

But now let us abolish this isolation from the rest of human existence of the incunabula of our faith, and throw open that time to free relation with the whole providence of humanity. Suppose Christianity to be the influence upon the world of a Divine Person,—in quality divine, in quantity human,—whose Epiphany was determined at a crisis of ripe conditions for the rescue, the evolution, the spread of holy and sanctifying truth. What are those conditions? They consist mainly in the co-presence, within the embrace of one vast state, of two opposite races or types of men, both having a partial gift of divine apprehension, and holding in charge an indispensable element of truth; both with their spiritual life verging to exhaustion and capable of no separate effort more; and each unconsciously pining away for want of the complement of thought which the other only could supply. The Hebrew brought his intense feeling of the Personality of God; conceiving this in so concentrated a form as to exclude the proper notion of infinitude, and render Him only the most powerful Being in the Universe, its Monarch,—wielding the creatures as his puppets,—acting historically upon its scenes as objective to Him, and by the annals of his past agency supplying to the Abrahamic family a religion of archives and documents. The sovereignty of Jehovah raised him to an immeasurable height above his creation; dwarfed all other existence; placed him by nature at a distance from men, and only by condescension allowing of approximation. And hence his worshippers, in proportion as they adored his greatness, felt the littleness of all else; acquired a temper towards their fellow-men, if not severe and scornful, at least not reverent and tender; and regarded them as separate in kind from Him, mere dust on the balance or locusts in the field. The religion of the Hellenic race began at the other end,—from the midst of human life, its mysteries, its struggles, its nobleness, its mixture of heroic Free-will and awful Destiny; and their deepest reverence, their quickest recognition of the Divine, was directed towards the soul of a man vindicating its grandeur, though it should be against superhuman powers. In proportion as men were great, beautiful, and good, did they appear to be as lesser gods, and earth and heaven to be filled with the same race. Thought, conscience, admiration in the human mind were not personal accidents separately originating in each individual; but the sympathetic response of our common intellect, standing in front of Nature, to the kindred life of the Divine intellect behind Nature, and ever passing into expression through it. When this feeling of the Hellenic race became reflective, and organized itself into philosophy, it represented the universe as the eternal assumption of form by the Divine thought, which we were enabled to read off by our essential identity of nature. Hence a whole series of conceptions quite different from the Hebrew representations; instead of Creation, Evolution of being; instead of Interposition from without, Incarnation operating from within; instead of Omnipotent Will, Universal Thought; assigning as the ideal of man’s perfection, not so much obedience to Law, as similitude of Mind to God; and tending predominantly not to strength in Morals, but to beauty in Art. These two opposite tendencies had run their separate course, and expended their proper history; and were talking wildly, as in the approaching delirium of death. But they are the two factors of all religious truth: and to fuse them together, to make it impossible that either should perish or should remain alone, the Christ was given to the world, so singularly balanced between them, that neither could resist his power, but both were drawn into it for the regeneration of mankind. In the accidents of his lot given to the one race, and only baffling the visions of prophets to transcend them; in the essence of his nature, so august and attractive to the other that the faith in Incarnation was irresistible; presented to the Hebrews by his mortal birth, and snatched from them by his immortal; stopping by his holiness the mouth of Law, and carrying it up into the higher region of Faith and Love; in the Temple wishing the Temple gone, that there might be open communion, Spirit with Spirit; translating sacrifice into self-sacrifice;—he had every requisite for conciliating and blending the separated elements of truth which, for so many ages, had been converging towards him. But if this was the function providentially assigned to him, and for which the divine and human were so blended in him, it is a function which could not be accomplished in a moment, in a generation, in a century. It is an historical function, freely demanding time for its theatre; and as the separate factors had occupied ages in attaining their ripeness for combination, so must their fusion consume many a lifetime of effervescing thought, ere the homogeneous truth appeared. The words of Christ are not in this view the end in which Revelation terminates; but the means given to us of knowing himself, contributions to the picture we form of his personality. Nor are the sentiments of his immediate followers about his office and position in the scheme of Providence anything more authoritative to us than the incipient attempts made, when his influence was fresh, to grasp the whole of his relations while only a part was to be seen. The records of the great crisis are no doubt of superlative value, as the vehicles by which alone we understand and feel its power; but their value is lost if they are to dictate truth to our passive acceptance, instead of quickening our reason and conscience to find it: they stop in this way the very development which they were to lead, and disappoint Christ of the very work he came to achieve. Human elements were inevitably and fully present in the first age and its Scriptures, as in every other; and the transitory ingredients they have left, it is a duty to detach from the eternal truth. And as conditions of finite imperfection cannot be banished from the central era, neither can the guidance of the Infinite Spirit be denied, whether among the Hebrew, the Hellenic, or the Christian people, in the ages before and after. In that new development of human consciousness and knowledge in regard to God, which we call Christianity, all the requisite conditions—viz. the factors taken up, the Person who blends them, and the continuous product they evolve—include Divine Inspiration as well as Human Reflection,—the living presence and communion of the Eternal with the Transitory Mind, of the perfectly Good with the good in the Imperfect. To disengage the one from the other, to treasure up the true and holy that is born of God, and let fall the false and wrong that is infused by man, is possible only to Reason and Conscience, is indeed the perpetual work in which they live; the denial of which is not merely Atheism, but Devil-worship,—not the bare negation, but the positive reversal, of religion,—the virtual affirmation that God indeed exists, but exists as Un-reason and Un-good. No mechanical, no chronological separation can be effected of the Divine from the Human, the Revealed from the Unrevealed, in faith; there is no person, no book, no age, no Church, in which both do not meet, and require to be disentangled the one from the other; but the perseverance of God’s living and self-harmonious Spirit throughout the discordant errors of dying generations enables the men most apt and faithful to his voice to know more and more what his reality is, and drop the semblances by which it is disguised. The effect of this view on our estimate of ecclesiastical literature is evident. As, according to it, the Apostolic period is not exempted from critical judgment, so neither are succeeding times to be without their claim on religious reverence. The canonical books of the New Testament fall back into the general mass of literature recording the earliest knowledge and consciousness of the disciples, neither detached, as a mysterious whole, from other productions of their time, nor excluding the greatest diversities of value among themselves. They exhibit the first struggling efforts—not always concurrent in their direction—of an awakening spiritual life, to interpret a recent Divine manifestation, and to solve by it the problem of the world’s Providence. Their very freshness and proximity to the great figure of Christ was by no means an unmixed advantage to these efforts; and they were not so complete and successful as to supersede their continuance in the next and following generations, which lay under no incompetency for their prosecution, and are as likely, so far as antecedent probability goes, to have enriched and improved, as to have impoverished and spoiled, the earlier doctrine of Christ’s relation to God and to mankind. The chasm thus disappears between the Apostolic age and its successor; the products of the first are not to be accepted simply because they are there, nor those of the second rejected because they are absent from the first; nor is everything to be admitted on showing that it stands in both, and even had a tenure long enough to become the prescriptive occupant of the Church. The Catholic is right in clinging to the continuous thread of Divine Inspiration binding the centuries of Christendom together; and in maintaining that the expression of true doctrine grows fuller with time. He is wrong in making the Spirit over to an hierarchical corporation; and in treating the ostensible growth of doctrine as the mere negation of heresies. The Protestant is right in rescuing from the haze of uncertain tradition the real historical ground of his religion, and setting it in the focus of an intense reverence; and in rejecting whatever cannot be adjusted with the clear facts and essential Spirit of that primitive Gospel. He is wrong in his insulation of that time as a sole authoritative age of golden days, in which the faith had neither error nor defect, and from which it must be copied, with daguerreotype exactitude, into every disciple’s mind. Keep the positive elements, destroy the negative limitations of both these systems, and the true conception of Christianity emerges. As a system of self-conscious doctrine, it is a religious Philosophy, starting from the historical appearance of Christ as an expression of God in human life, and always detained around this one object as its centre; and in its development consulting not the idiosyncrasies and conceits of private and personal reflection, but the devout consciousness and spiritual consensus of all Christian ages and all holy men. All religion is the product of an action of the Infinite mind upon the finite: in the Christian religion that action takes place upon souls engaged in the contemplation of Christ as the manifestation of God’s moral nature. This given object remaining the same, there is room for indefinite expansion and variety; and every developed form is to be tried, not by its date, but by the tests of truth relevant to religious philosophy.

How far M. Bunsen would recognize his own doctrine in this exposition we cannot say; but without intending in the least to make him responsible for it, we think it does not essentially deviate from his scheme of thought. The philosophical aphorisms in which he has embodied his speculative faith follow an order which we should have spoiled, had we, for our present purpose, so brought them together as to make them speak for themselves. And though they display the same astonishing command of our language, in which the author never fails, the cast of the thoughts is so Teutonic, that few English readers, it is to be feared, will appreciate their depth and richness. The complaint, which we have heard and seen, that they are wholly unintelligible, is indeed purely ridiculous, except that it sadly illustrates the extent to which reflection, and even feeling, on such subjects has ceased in England. M. Bunsen, we can assure our readers, knows what he means, and lucidly states what he means; and those who miss his meaning have for the most part no slight loss. The following sentences, which the greatest sufferer from philosophobia may drink in without convulsions, will explain his idea of Revelation, in its bearing upon the use of written records. The mere “Natural Religion” of the Deist, he observes, was—

“The negative reaction against the equally untenable, unphilosophical, and irrational notion, that revelation was nothing but an external historical act. Such a notion entirely loses sight of the infinite or eternal factor of revelation, founded both in the nature of the infinite and that of the finite mind, of God and man.

“This heterodox notion became still more obnoxious, by its imagining something higher in the manifestation of God’s will and being than the human mind, which is the divinely-appointed organ of divine manifestation, and in a double manner; ideally in mankind, as object, historically in the individual man, as instrument.

“The notion of a merely historical revelation by written records is as unhistorical as it is unintellectual and materialistic. It necessarily leads to untruth in philosophy, to unreality in religious thought, and to Fetichism in worship. It misunderstands the process necessarily implied in every historical representation. The form of expressing the manifestation of God in the mind, as if God was himself using human speech to man, and was thus himself finite and a man, is a form inherent in the nature of human thought as embodied in language, its own rational expression. It was originally never meant to be understood materialistically, because the religious consciousness which produced it was essentially spiritual; and, indeed, it can only be thus misunderstood by those who make it a rule and criterion of faith, never to connect any thought whatever with what they are expected to believe as divinely true.

“Every religion is positive. It is, therefore, justly called a religion ‘made manifest’ (offenbart), or, as the English term has it, revealed; that is to say, it supposes an action of the infinite mind, or God, upon the finite mind, or man, by which God, in his relation to man, becomes manifest or visible. This can be mediate, through the manifestation of God in the Universe of Nature; or a direct, immediate action, through the religious consciousness.

“This second action is called revealed, in the strictest sense. The more a religion manifests of the real substance and nature of God, and of his relation to the universe and to man, the more it deserves the name of a divine manifestation, or of Revelation. But no religion which exists could exist without something of truth, revealed to man, through the creation, and through his mind.

“Such a direct communication of the Divine mind as is called Revelation has necessarily two factors, which are unitedly working in producing it. The one is the infinite factor, or the direct manifestation of eternal truth to the mind, by the power which that mind has of perceiving it; for human perception is the correlate of divine manifestation. There could be no revelation of God if there was not the corresponding faculty in the human mind to receive it, as there is no manifestation of light where there is no eye to see it.

“This infinite factor is, of course, not historical; it is inherent in every individual soul, only with an immense difference in the degree.

“The action of the Infinite upon the mind, is the miracle of history and of religion, equal to the miracle of creation.

“Miracle, in its highest sense, is therefore essentially and undoubtedly an operation of the Divine mind upon the human mind. By that action the human mind becomes inspired with a new life, which cannot be explained by any precedent of the selfish (natural) life, but is its absolute contrary. This miracle requires no proof; the existence and action of religious life is its proof, as the world is the proof of creation.

“The second factor of revelation is the finite or external. This means of divine manifestation is, in the first place, a universal one, the Universe or Nature. But, in a more special sense, it is a historical manifestation of divine truth through the life and teaching of higher minds among men. These men of God are eminent individuals, who communicate something of eternal truth to their brethren; and, as far as they themselves are true, they have in them the conviction, that what they say and teach of things divine is an objective truth. They therefore firmly believe that it is independent of their individual personal opinion and impression, and will last, and not perish, as their personal existence upon earth must.

“The difference between Christ and other men of God is analogous to that between the manifestation of a part, and of the totality and substance, of the divine mind.”—Vol. II. p. 60, seq.

The newly-found work, like other productions of the same period, can have only a disturbing interest for the Roman Catholic and Orthodox Protestant. For, in conjunction with previous evidence, it shows that the unbroken unity of teaching is altogether a fiction; that what afterwards became heresy was, in the latter part of the second century, held in the church of the primacy itself, and by successors of St. Peter; that the clergy of Rome, so far from owning the apostolic authority of their chief, could resist him as heterodox; and that the contents of the Catholic system, far from appearing as an invariable whole from the first, were a gradual synthesis of elements flowing in from new channels of influence brought into connection with the faith; and as against the approved type of Protestant, it shows that his favorite scheme of dogma was still in a very unripe state, and that further back it had been still more so; so that if he binds himself to the earliest creed, he may probably have to accept a profession which he hardly regards as Christian at all. But from the third point of view, which assumes that development is an inherent necessity in a revelation, and may add to its truth, instead of subtracting from it, the monuments of Christian literature from the secondary period have a positive interest, free from all uneasiness and alarm. They arrest for us, in the midst, the advance of theological belief towards the form ultimately recognized in the Church, and expressed in the established creeds; they render visible the beautiful features and expanded look of the faith, when its Judaic blood had been cooled by the waters of an Hellenic baptism; and though they leave many undetermined problems as to the successive steps by which the original Hebrew type of the Gospel in Jerusalem was metamorphosed into the Nicene and hierarchical Christianity, they fix some intermediate points, and make us profoundly conscious of the greatness of the change.

The author of the “Philosophumena,” for instance, would be stopped at the threshold of every sect in our own country, and excluded as heterodox. He crosses the lines of our theological definitions, and trespasses on forbidden ground, in every possible doctrinal direction. Cardinal Wiseman would have nothing to say to him; for he is insubordinate to the “Vicar of Christ,” and profanely insists that a pope may be deposed by his own council of presbyters. The Bishop of Exeter would refuse him institution; for his Trinity is imperfect, and he allows no Personality to the Holy Ghost. The Archbishop of Dublin might probably think him a little hard upon Sabellius; but, if he would quietly sign the Articles, (which, however, he could by no means do,) might abstain from retaliation, and let him pass. At Manchester, Canon Stowell would keep him in hot water for his respectable opinion of human nature, and his lofty doctrine of free-will. In Edinburgh, Dr. Candlish would not listen to a man who had nothing to say of reliance on the imputed merits of Christ. The sapient board at New College, St. John’s Wood, would expel him for his loose notions of Inspiration. And the Unitarians would find him too transcendental, make no common sense out of his notions of Incarnation, and recommend him to try Germany. This fact, that a bishop of the second and third centuries would be ecclesiastically not a stranger only, but an outcast among us, is most startling; and ought surely to open the eyes of modern Christians to the false and dangerous position into which their churches have been brought by narrow-heartedness and insincerity. It will not be M. Bunsen’s fault if our Churchmen remain insensible to the national peril and disgrace of maintaining unreformed a system long known to have no heart of modern reality, and now seen to have as little ground of ancient authority. Again and again he raises his voice of earnest and affectionate warning. As a foreigner domesticated among us, as a scholar of wide historical view, as a philosophical statesman who, amid the diplomacy of the hour, descends to the springs of perennial life in nations, as a Christian who profoundly trusts the reality of religion, and cannot be dazzled by the pretence, he sees, with a rare clearness and breadth, both the capabilities and the dangers of our social and spiritual condition. He sees that God has given to the English people a moral massiveness and veracity of character which presents the grandest basis of noble faith; while learned selfishness and aristocratic apathy uphold in the Church creeds which only stupidity can sign without mental reservations,—a Liturgy that catches the scruple of the intellectual without touching the enthusiasm of the popular heart,—a laity without function,—a clergy without unity,—and a hierarchy without power. He sees that our insular position has imparted to us a distinctive nationality of feeling, supplying copious elements for coalescence in a common religion; while obstinate conservatism has permitted our Christianity to become our great divisive power, and to disintegrate us through and through. He respects our free institutions, which sustain the health of our political life; but beside them he finds an ecclesiastical system either imposed by a dead and inflexible necessity, or left unguided to a whimsical voluntaryism, which separates the combinations of faith from the relations of neighborhood, of municipality, of country. With noble and richly-endowed universities at the exclusive disposal of the Church, he finds the theological and philosophical sciences so shamefully neglected, that Christian faith notoriously does not hold its intellectual ground, and in its retreat does nothing to reach a firmer position; but only protests its resolution to stand still, and raise a din against the critic or metaphysic host that drives it back. Is there no one in this great and honest country that has trust enough in God and truth, foresight enough of ruin from falsehood and pretence, to lay the first hand to the work of renovation? Is statesmanship so infected with negligent contempt of mankind, that no high-minded politician can be found to care for the highest discipline of the people, and reorganize the institutions in which their conscience, their reason, their upward aspirations, should find life? Has the Church no prophet with faith enough to fling aside creed and college, and fire within him to burn away mediæval pedantries, and demand an altar of veracity, that may bring us together for common work and “common prayer”? Or is it to be left to the strong men, exulting in their strength, and storming with the furor of honest discontent, to settle these matters with the sledge-hammer of their indignation? Miserable hypocrisy! to open the lips and lift the eyes to heaven, while beckoning with the finger of apathy to these pioneers of Necessity! Would that some might be found to lay to heart our author’s warning and counsel in the following sentences:—

“While we exclude all suggestions of despair, as being equally unworthy of a man and of a Christian, we establish two safe principles. The first is, that, in all congregational and ecclesiastical institutions, Christian freedom, within limits conformable to Scripture, constitutes the first requisite for a vital restoration. The second fundamental principle is, that every Church must hold fast what she already possesses, in so far as it presents itself to her consciousness as true and efficacious. In virtue of the first condition, she will combine Reason and Scripture in due proportions; by virtue of the second, she will distinguish between Spirit and Letter, between Idea and Form. No external clerical forms and mediæval reflexes of bygone social and intellectual conditions can save us, nor can sectarian schisms and isolation from national life. Neither can learned speculations, and still less the incomparably more arrogant dreams of the unlearned. Scientific consciousness must dive into real life, and refresh itself in the feelings of the people, and that no one will be able to do without having made himself thoroughly conversant with the sufferings and the sorrows of the lowest classes of society. For out of the feeling of these sufferings and sorrows, as being to a great degree the most extensive and most deep-seated product of evil,—that is, of selfishness,—arose, eighteen hundred years ago, the divine birth of Christianity. The new birth, however, requires new pangs of labor, and not only on the part of individuals, but of the whole nation, in so far as she bears within her the germs of future life, and possesses the strength to bring forth. Every nation must set about the work herself, not, indeed, as her own especial exclusive concern, but as the interest of all mankind. Every people has the vocation to coin for itself the divine form of Humanity, in the Church as well as in the State; its life depends on this being done, not its reputation merely; it is the condition of existence, not merely of prosperity.

“Is it not time, in truth, to withdraw the veil from our misery? to point to the clouds which rise from all quarters, to the noxious vapors which have already well-nigh suffocated us? to tear off the mask from hypocrisy, and destroy that sham which is undermining all real ground beneath our feet? to point out the dangers which surround, nay, threaten already to engulf us? Is the state of things satisfactory in a Christian sense, where so much that is unchristian predominates, and where Christianity has scarcely begun here and there to penetrate the surface of the common life? Shall we be satisfied with the increased outward respect paid to Christianity and the Church? Shall we take it as a sign of renewed life, that the names of God and Christ have become the fashion, and are used as a party badge? Can a society be said to be in a healthy condition, in which material and selfish interests in individuals, as well as in the masses, gain every day more and more the upper hand? in which so many thinking and educated men are attached to Christianity only by outward forms, maintained either by despotic power, or by a not less despotic, half-superstitious, half-hypocritical custom? when so many churches are empty, and satisfy but few, or display more and more outward ceremonials and vicarious rites? when a godless schism has sprung up between spirit and form, or has even been preached up as a means of rescue? when gross ignorance or confused knowledge, cold indifference or the fanaticism of superstition, prevails as to the understanding of Holy Scripture, as to the history, nay, the fundamental ideas of Christianity? when force invokes religion in order to command, and demagogues appeal to the religious element in order to destroy? when, after all their severe chastisements and bloody lessons, most statesmen base their wisdom only on the contempt of mankind? and when the prophets of the people preach a liberty, the basis of which is selfishness, the object libertinism, and the wages are vice? And this in an age the events of which show more and more fatal symptoms, and in which a cry of ardent longing pervades the people, re-echoed by a thousand voices!”—III. xv.

Sorry, however, as we should be to see our Roman presbyter disconsolately wandering from fold to fold in modern England, and dismissed as a black sheep from all, we should not like to find him metamorphosed into chief shepherd either, and invested with the guidance of our ecclesiastical affairs. Though he is above imitating the feeble railing of Irenæus at the heresies, he deals with them in the true clerical style; often missing their real meaning, he does not spare them his bad word; and fancies he has killed them before he has even caught them. He has an evident relish also for a tale of scandal, as a make-weight against a theological opponent. In the “Little Labyrinth,” he had told us a story about a Unitarian minister, who, for accepting his schismatical office, had been horsewhipped by angels all night; so that he crawled in the morning to the metropolitan, and gave in his penitential recantation. And now, in the larger work, the author flies at higher game, and makes out that Pope Callistus was an incorrigible scamp; originally a slave in the household of a wealthy Christian master, Carpophorus, whose confidence he abused in every possible way. First, having been intrusted with the management of a bank in the Piscina publica, he swindled and ruined the depositors, and decamped, with the intention of sailing from Portus, but was found on board ship; and, though he jumped into the sea to avoid capture, was picked up, and condemned by his master to the hand-mill. Next, being allowed to go out, on the plea of collecting some debts which would enable him to pay a dividend to the depositors, he created a riot in a Jews’ synagogue, and, being brought before the prefect, was sentenced to be flogged and transported to Sardinia. Thence he escaped by passing himself off among a number of Christians, released from their exile through the influence of the Emperor’s concubine, Marcia, and on the recommendation of Victor, the Pope. As he was not included in the list of pardons, he no sooner made his appearance in Rome than his master sent him off to live on a monthly allowance at Antium. On the death of Carpophorus, he seems to have attained his freedom by bequest; and his fertility of resource having made him useful to the new Pope Zephyrinus, he acquired influence enough to succeed him in the Primacy. We must confess that the evident gusto with which our presbyter tells this scandal, the animus with which he accuses Zephyrinus also of stupidity and venality, and the predominance in his narrative of theological antipathy over moral disgust, leave a painful impression on the reader respecting the spirit then at work in the Apostolic See. And though his scheme of belief, especially in relation to the person of Christ, was more rational than the definitions of more modern creeds, yet we fear that he would be not less nice about its shape, and intolerant of those who move about in freer folds of thought, than a divine of the Canterbury cloisters or the Edinburgh platform. His quarrel with the two popes whom he abuses shows pretty clearly the stage of development which the Christian theology had then reached. On this matter we must say a few words.

Whatever may have been the precise order of combination which brought the Hebrew and Hellenic ideas of God into union, there can be no doubt about the two termini of the process. It started from the monarchical conception of Jehovah, as a Unity without plurality; and it issued in the Athanasian Trinity, with its three hypostases in one essence. Of these, the Father expressed the Absolute existence, the Son the Objective manifestation, the Holy Spirit the Subjective revelation of God. In the presbyter’s creed, the third term was not yet incorporated, but still floated freely, diffused and impersonal. Leaving this out of view, we may observe, in the remaining part of the doctrine, two principal difficulties to be surmounted, arising from the double medium of divine objective manifestation,—Nature, always proceeding,—and Christ, historically transient. The first problem is, How to pass at all out of the Infinite existence into Finite phenomena, and conceive the relation between the Father and the Son; the second, How to pass from Eternal manifestation through all phenomena into temporary appearance in an Individual, so as to conceive the relation between the Son and the Galilean Christ. Thus, excluding all reference to the Holy Spirit, there were, in fact, four objects of thought, whose relations to one another were to be adjusted; viz. the Father, the Son evolving all things, the Christ or divine individualization in the Gospel, and Jesus of Nazareth, the human being with whose life this individualization concurred. Among all these there were, so to speak, two clearly distinct Wills to dispose of; that of the man Jesus at the lowest extremity, and that of the Supreme God, which the Jew, at least, would fix at the upper. These two Wills act, in the whole development of doctrine on this subject, as the secret centres of Personality; and the remaining elements obtain or miss a hypostatic character according as they are drawn or not into coalescence with the one or the other. The volitional point of the Divine Agency being once determined, it may be regarded as enclosed between the Thought, or intellectual essence out of which it comes, and the Execution by which it is realized; or it may be left undistinguished from these, and may be made to coincide with either. According to these variable conditions arise the several modes of doctrine in reference to the Divine element in God’s Objective manifestation. The differences, for instance, between our presbyter’s doctrine and Origen’s, will be found to depend on the different points which they seize as the seat of divine volition, and the germ of their logical development. Our author, exemplifying the Hebrew tendency, seeks his initiative up at the fountain-head, and puts himself back before the first act of creation; he starts from the One God, with whom nothing was co-present, and fixes in Him the seat of the primeval Will. There, however, it would remain, a mere potentiality, did not the Eternal Mind, by reflection in itself, pass into self-consciousness, and give objectivity to its own thought. This primary expression of his essence, in which it enters into relation, but relation only to itself, is the Logos, or Son of God, the agent in the production of all things. The potentiality is thus reserved to the Father; the effectuation is given to the Son; who, coming in at a point lower down than the seat of Will, and simply bridging over the interval that leads to accomplishment, is felt without the essential condition of a numerically distinct subsistence; and has either the instrumental and subordinate personality of a dependent being, or is imperfectly hypostatized.41 In this impersonal character does the Logos manifest the Divine thought in the visible universe; in the minds of godly men, which are the source of law; in the glance of prophets, which catches and interprets the divine significance of all times; and first assumes a full personality in the Incarnation. Having left the primary Will behind in the Father’s essence, the Logos remains but an inchoate hypostasis, till alighting, in the human nature, on another centre of volition. As if our author were half conscious, in reaching this point, of relief from an antecedent uneasiness, he now holds fast to the personality which has been realized, represents it as not dissolved by the death on the cross, but taken up into heaven, and abiding for ever. It is, in this view, the two extreme terms that supply the hypostatizing power; of the others, the Logos has no personality but by looking back to the Father; nor the Christ, but by going forward to the Son of Mary. This shows the yet powerful influence of the Judaic Monarchianism, and the embarrassment of a mind, setting out from that type of faith, to provide any plurality within the essence of God. Origen, on the other hand, yielded to the Hellenic feeling, and, instead of going back to any absolute commencement, looked for his Divine centre and starting-point further down; and took thence whatever upward glance was needful to complete his view. As the Greek reverence was not touched but by the Divine embodied in concrete life and form, so the Alexandrine catechist instinctively fixed upon the Son, the objective Thought of God, proceeding, not once upon a time or ever first, but eternally, from Him, as the initiative position for his doctrine. Here was placed the clearest and intensest focus of Will; and only in this ever-evolving efficient were the full conditions of personality realized. The Father was conceived more pantheistically, as the universal νους, the intellectual background, whence issued the acting nature of the Son. In meditating on them in their conjunction, Origen would think of the relation between thought and volition; our author, of that between volition and execution. Both doctrines show the imperfect fusion of Hebrew and Hellenic elements, and illustrate the characteristic effect of an excessive proportion of each. Where the Hebrew element prevails, the personality of the Son is endangered; where the Hellenic, the personality of the Father. Even our presbyter’s doctrine of the Son, however, gave too strong an impersonation to Him for the party in Rome who sided with Zephyrinus and Callistus. These popes accused him, it seems, of being a Ditheist; and themselves maintained that the terms Father and Son denoted only different sides and relations of one and the same Being,—nay, not only of the same Being, but of the same προσωπον; and that the spirit that dwelt in Christ was the Father, of whom all things are full. For this opinion the two popes are angrily dealt with by our author, and charged with being half Sabellian, half humanitarian. His rancor justifies the suspicion, that, though he represents the party which triumphed at Rome, his opponents had been numerous and powerful, as, indeed, their election to the primacy would of itself show, and that even his own imperfect dogma was superinduced, not without a protracted struggle, upon an earlier faith yet remote from the Nicene standard.

And this brings us at once to a question of historical research, which, though far too intricate and extensive to be discussed here, we feel bound to notice, as far as it is affected by the newly discovered work. How long did it take for the Christian faith to assume the leading features of its orthodox and catholic form, and especially to work itself clear of Judaism? It is an acknowledged fact, that the earliest disciples, including at the lowest estimate all the converts of the first seven years from the ascension, not only were born Hebrews, but did not regard their baptism as in any way withdrawing them from the pale of their national religion; that, on the contrary, they claimed to be the only true Jews, differing from others simply by their belief in a personally appointed, instead of a vaguely promised Messiah; that they aimed at no more than to bring over their own race to this conviction, and persuade them that the national destinies were about to be consummated, and, so far from relaxing the obligations of their Law, adhered with peculiar rigor to its ritual and its exclusiveness. So long as none but the twelve Apostles had charge of its diffusion, Christianity was only a particular mode of Judaism, and its whole discussion a ζητησις των Ιουδαιων. It is further admitted, that the first inroad upon this narrowness was made by St. Paul, who insisted on the universality of Christ’s function, and the abrogation of the Mosaic Law in favor of inward faith, as the condition of union with God. Nor, again, is it denied that this freer view met with great resistance, and that its conflict with the other, apparent throughout the Pauline Epistles, formed the most animating feature of the Apostolic age. During that period, two distinct parties, and two separate lines of development and growth, may be traced; one following out in morals the legal idea into asceticism, voluntary poverty, and physical purity, and in faith the monarchian idea into theocratic and millenarian expectations; the other, proceeding from the notion of faith to substitute an ideal Christ for the historical, a new religion for an old law, the free embrace of divine reconciliation for the anxious strain of self-mortifying obedience. But how long did this struggle and separation continue? According to the prevalent belief, it was all over in a few years; and, by the happy harmony and concurrence of the Apostles, was determined in favor of the generous Pauline doctrine; so that St. John lived to see the Hebrew Christians sink into a mere Ebionitish sect outside the pale, and their stiff Unitarian theology disowned in favor of the higher teachings of his Gospel. Against this assumption of so easy a victory over the Jewish tendency, several striking testimonies have often been urged. Tertullian, in a well-known passage of his treatise against Praxeas, describes the dislike with which the unlearned majority of believers regard the Trinitarian distinctions in the Godhead, and the zeal with which they cry out for holding to “the Monarchy.”42 In the time of Pope Zephyrinus, as we learn from Eusebius, a body of Unitarians in Rome, followers of Artemon, defended their doctrine by the conservative plea of antiquity and general consent; affirming that it was no other than the uninterrupted creed of the Roman Church down to the time of Victor, the preceding pope; and that the higher doctrine of the Person of Christ was quite a recent innovation.43 Nor are we without ecclesiastical literature, of even a later date, that by its theological tone gives witness to the same effect. The “Clementine Recognitions,” written somewhere between 212 and 230, occupy a dogmatic position, higher indeed than the disciples of Artemon, but only in the direction of Arius, and, to save the Unity of God, deny the Deity of Christ.44 Relying on such evidence as this, Priestley, in his “History of Early Opinions,” and his controversy with Bishop Horsley, maintained that the creed of the Church for the first two centuries was Unitarian. But this position was attended with many difficulties, so long as the present canonical Scriptures were allowed to have been in the hands of the Christians of that period, and recognized as authorities; for the narratives of the miraculous conception, the writings of Paul, and the Gospel of John, are irreconcilable with the schemes of belief attributed to the early Unitarians. Moreover, if for two centuries the Church had interpreted its authoritative documents in one way, and formed on this its services and expositions, it is not easy to conceive the rapid revolution into another. During a period of free and floating tradition, there is manifest room for the growth of essentially different modes of faith; but after the reception of a definite set of sacred books, the scope for change is much contracted. To treat the doctrine of the Logos as an innovation, yet ascribe the fourth Gospel to the beloved disciple; to suppose that justification by works was the generally received notion among people who guided themselves by the authority of Paul,—involves us in irremediable contradictions. Avoiding these at least, possibly not without the risk of others, the celebrated theologians of Tübingen have maintained a bolder thesis than that of Priestley, including it indeed, but with it also a vast deal more. Their theory runs as follows. The opposition which St. Paul’s teaching excited, and of which his letters preserve so many traces, was neither so insignificant nor so short-lived as is commonly supposed; but was encouraged and led by the other Apostles, especially James and John and Peter, who never heartily recognized the volunteer Apostle; and was so completely successful, that he died without having made any considerable impression on the Judaic Christianity sanctioned from Jerusalem. Accordingly, the earliest Christian literature was Ebionitish; and no production was in higher esteem than the “Gospel of the Hebrews,” which, after being long current, with several variations of form, at last settled down into our Gospel of Matthew. In almost all the writings known to us, even in Roman circles of the second century,—the Shepherd of Hermas, the Memorials of Hegesippus, the works of Justin,—some character or other of Ebionitism is present,—millenarian doctrine, admiration of celibacy and of abstinence from meat and wine, denunciation of riches, emphatic assertion of the Messiahship of Jesus, and treatment of the miraculous conception as at least an open question. The labors of Paul, however, had left a seed which had been buried, but not killed; and from the first, a small party had cherished his freer principles, and sought to win acceptance for them; and as the progress of time increased the proportion of provincial and Gentile converts, and the Jewish wars of Titus and Hadrian destroyed the possibility of Mosaic obedience and the reasonableness of Hebrew hopes, the Pauline element rose in magnitude and importance. Thus the two courses of opposite development ran parallel with each other, and gradually found their interest in mutual recognition and concession. Hence, a series of writings proceeding from either side, first of conciliatory approximation only, next of complete neutrality and equipoise, in which sometimes the figures of Peter and Paul themselves are presented with studiously balanced honor, at others their characteristic ideas are adjusted by compromise. The Clementine Homilies, the Apostolic Constitutions, the Epistle of James, the Second Epistle of Clement, the Gospel of Mark, the Recognitions, the Second Epistle of Peter, constitute the series proceeding from the Ebionitish side; while from the Pauline came the First Epistle of Peter, the Preaching of Peter, the writings of Luke, the First Epistle of Clement, the Epistle to the Philippians, the Pastoral Epistles, Polycarp’s, and the Ignatians. These productions, however, springing from the practical instinct of the West, deal with the ecclesiastical more than with the doctrinal phase of antagonism between the two directions; and end with establishing in Rome a Catholic Church, founded on the united sepulchres of Peter and Paul, and combining the sacerdotalism of the Old Testament with the universality of the New Gentile Gospel. Meanwhile, a similar course, with local modifications, was run by the Church of Asia Minor. Rome, with its political aptitude, having taken in hand the questions of discipline and organization, the speculative genius of the Asiatic Greek addressed itself simultaneously to the development and determination of doctrine. Here the Epistle to the Galatians marks, as a starting-point, the same original struggle between the contrasted elements which the Epistle to the Romans betrays in Italy; while the Gospel of John closes the dogmatic strife of development with an accepted Trinity for faith, just as the Ignatian Epistles wind up the contests of the West with a recognized hierarchy for government. And between these extremes the East presents to us, first, the intensely Judaical Apocalypse; next, with increasing reaction in the Pauline direction, the rudiments of the Logos idea in the Epistles to the Hebrews, Colossians, and Ephesians; and as Montanism, in the midst of which these arose, had already made familiar the conception of the Paraclete, all the conditions were present for combination into the Johannine doctrine of the Trinity; and then it was, in the second quarter of the second century, that the fourth Gospel appeared. The speculative theology thus native to Lesser Asia was adopted for shelter and growth by the kindred Hellenism of Egypt, and gave rise to the school of Alexandria. In the whole of this theory great use is made of Montanism: it spans, as it were, the interval between the parallel movements of Italy and Asia; and is the common medium of thought in which they both take place. Singularly uniting in itself the rigor, the narrowness, the ascetic superstitions of its Hebrew basis, with a Phrygian prophetic enthusiasm and an Hellenic theosophy, it imported the latter into the doctrine, the former into the discipline, of the Church. The Roman Catholic system betrays its Jewish or Montanist origin in its legalism, its penances, its celibacy, its monachism, its ecstatic phenomena, its physical supernaturalism, its exaggerated appreciation of martyrdom.

Such, in barest outline, is the theory which M. Bunsen characterizes as the “Tübingen romance.” Its leading principle is, that the antagonism between the Petrine and Pauline, the Hebrew and the Hellenic Gospel, which has its origin and authentic expression in the Epistles to the Galatians, Romans, and Corinthians, continued into the second century; determined the evolution of doctrine and usage; stamped itself upon the ecclesiastical literature; and ended in the compromise and reconciliation of the Catholic Church. It is evident that, in the working out of this principle, the New Testament canon is made to give way. With the exception of the greater Pauline Epistles and the Apocalypse, both of which are held fast as genuine productions of the Apostles whose names they bear, and the first Gospel, which is allowed to have at least the groundwork in the primitive tradition, the received books are all set loose from the dates and names usually assigned to them, and arranged, in common with other products of the time, according to the relation they bear to the Ebionitish or to the Pauline school, and the particular stage they seem to mark in the history of either. This proceeding, however, is not an original violence resorted to for the exigencies of the theory; but, for the most part, a mere appropriation to its use of conclusions reached by antecedent theologians on independent grounds. The Epistle to the Philippians is the only work, if we mistake not, on the authenticity of which doubt has been thrown for the first time,—in our opinion, on very inadequate grounds. In this, as in many other details of the hypothetical history, there is not a little of that straining of real evidence and subtle fabrication of unreal, which German criticism seems unable to avoid. But the acerbity displayed by the North German theologians towards the Tübingen critics appears to us unwarranted and humiliating; and we certainly wish that M. Bunsen, whose prompt admiration of excellence so nobly distinguishes him from Ewald, could have expressed his dissent from Baur and Schwegler in a tone still further removed from the Göttingen pitch. At least, we do not find the positive assertion that the Tübingen theory is finally demolished by the “Philosophumena” at all borne out by the evidence; and are inclined to think that the case is very little altered by the new elements now contributed to its discussion. The critical offence which he thinks is now detected and exposed, is the ascription of a late origin to the fourth Gospel,45 and the treatment of it as the perfected product, instead of the misused source, of the Montanist conceptions of the Logos and the Paraclete. It cannot, however, be denied, that, in the previous absence of any external testimony to the existence of this Gospel earlier than the year 170,46 the internal difficulties are sufficiently serious to redeem the doubt of its authenticity from the character of rashness or perversity. The irreconcilable opposition between its whole mode of thought and that of the Apocalypse is confessed by M. Bunsen himself, when he suggests that the proem on the Logos was directed against Cerinthus,—the very person whose sentiments the Apocalypse was supposed to express, and to whom, accordingly, it was ascribed by those who rejected it. One of the two books must resign, then, the name of the beloved disciple; and, of the two, we need hardly say that the Apocalypse is incomparably the better authenticated. Moreover, the traditions which unite the names of James and John, as the authorities followed by the Church of Lesser Asia, render it hard to conceive that their doctrines can have taken precisely opposite directions; and that, while James represented the Judaic Christianity of the deepest dye, John can have produced the standard and conclusive work on the other side. In particular, the well-known fact, that the Asiatic Christians justified their Jewish mode of keeping Easter by the double plea, (1.) that James and John always did so, (2.) that Christ himself had done so before he suffered, seems incompatible with any knowledge of the fourth Gospel, which denies that Jesus ate the passover before he suffered, and makes his own death to be the passover. How could this Quartodeciman controversy live a day among a people possessing and acknowledging John’s Gospel, which so bears upon it as to give a distinct contradiction to the view of the other Gospels, and to pronounce in Asia Minor itself an unambiguous verdict in favor of the West? These are grave difficulties, which, after all the ingenuity, even of Bleek, remain, we fear, unrelieved; and in their presence we cannot feel the justice of M. Bunsen’s sentence, that Baur’s opinion is “the most unhappy of philological conjectures.” Everything conjectural, however, must give way before real historical testimony; and, if new evidence is actually contained in the “Philosophumena,” every true critic, of Tübingen or elsewhere, will be thankful for light to dissipate the doubt. Now, it is said that our Roman bishop, in treating of the heresy of Basilides, supplies passages from the writings of this heresiarch which include quotations from the fourth Gospel; and thus prove its existence as early as the year 130. This argument, as stated by M. Bunsen, appeared to us quite conclusive, and we hoped, that a decided step had been gained towards the settlement of the question. Great was our disappointment, on reading the account in the original, to find no evidence that any extract from Basilides was before us at all. A general description of the system bearing his name is given; but with no mention of any work of his, no profession that the words are his, and even so little individual reference to him, that the exposition is introduced as being a report of what “Basilides and Isidorus, and the whole troop of these people, falsely say” (καταψευδεται, sing.). Then follows the account of the dogmas of the sect, with the word φησιν inserted from time to time, to indicate that the writer is still reporting the sentiments of others. The singular form of this word implies nothing at all; it occurs immediately after the word καταψευδεται, and has the same avowedly plural subject. The statement, therefore, within which are contained the Scripture citations, is a merely general one of the opinions of a sect which continued to subsist till a much later time than the lowest date ever assigned for the composition of the fourth Gospel. If the actual words of any writings current among these heretics are given, they are the words of an author or authors wholly unknown, and to refer them to Basilides in particular is a mere arbitrary act of will. The change from the singular to the plural forms of citation in the midst of one and the same sentence, and the disregard of concord between verb and subject, show that no inference can be drawn from so loose a system of grammatical usage. All that can be affirmed is, that our author had in his hand some production of the Basilidian χορος, in which the fourth Gospel was quoted; but this affords no chronological datum that can be of the smallest use.47 The same remark applies to the use of John’s Gospel by the Ophites. That they did use it is evident; that they existed as far back as the time of Peter and Paul is certainly probable; yet it does not follow that the fourth Gospel was then extant. For they continued in existence through two or three centuries, dating, as Baur has shown, from a time anterior not only to the Christian heresies, but to Christianity itself, and extending down to Origen’s time; and to what part of this long period the writings belonged which the author of the “Philosophumena” employed, we are absolutely unable to determine. We do not know why M. Bunsen has not appealed also to a quotation from the Gospel which occurs (p. 194) in an account of the Valentinian system. If, as he affirms (I. 63), this account were really in “Valentinus’s own words,” the citation would be of particular value in the controversy. For it has always been urged by the Tübingen critics as a highly significant fact, that while the followers of Valentinus showed an especial eagerness to appeal to the Gospel of John, and one of the earliest, Heracleon, wrote a commentary upon it, no trace could be found of its use by the heresiarch himself. From this circumstance, they have inferred that the Gospel was not available for him, and first appeared after his time. A single clause cited by him from the Gospel would demolish this argument at once. But the assertion that we have here “full eight pages of Valentinus’s own words” appears to us quite groundless. No such thing is affirmed by the writer of the eight pages. He promises to tell us how the strict adherents to the original principle of the sect expounded their doctrine (ὡς εκεινοι διδασκουσι); and then passes over, as usual, to the singular φησι, returning, however, from time to time, to the plural forms,—θελουσι, λεγουσι, &c.,—and thus leaving no pretext for the assumption that Valentinus is before us in person. The later Gnostics indisputably resorted to the Gospel of John with especial zeal and preference; and if their predecessors, Basilides and Valentinus, were acquainted with the book, it is surprising that no trace of their familiarity with it has been found; and that the former should have sought to authenticate the secret doctrine he professed to have received by the name of Matthew or Matthias instead of John. It deserves remark, that the citations preserved by our author are made, like those of Justin Martyr, as from an anonymous writing, without mentioning the name of the Evangelist; a circumstance less surprising in reference to the Synoptics alone, which present only varieties of the same fundamental tradition, than when the fourth Gospel, so evidently the independent production of a single mind, is thrown into the group. The Epistles of Paul and the books of the Old Testament are frequently quoted by name; and why this practice should invariably cease whenever the historical work of an Apostle was in the hand, it is not easy to explain. The Apocalypse is mentioned not without his name.48

For these reasons we are of opinion that the question about the date and authenticity of the fourth Gospel is wholly unaffected by the newly-discovered work. On this side, no new facilities are gained for confuting the Tübingen theory. The most positive and startling fact against it is presented from another direction. We know that the system of Theodotus, which was Unitarian, was condemned by Victor in the last decade of the second century.49 Now Victor was the very pope to the end of whose period, according to the followers of Artemon, their monarchian faith was upheld in the Roman Church, and in the time of whose successor was the first importation of the higher doctrine of the Logos. On this complaint of the Artemonites, Baur and Schwegler lay great stress; but is it not refuted by Victor’s orthodox act of expelling a Unitarian? Undoubtedly it would be so, if Theodotus were excommunicated precisely for his belief in the uni-personality of God. But his scheme included many articles; and we know nothing of the ground taken in the proceedings against him. There was one question, however, which, however indifferent to us, was evidently very near to the feelings of the early Church, and on which Theodotus separated himself from the prevailing conceptions of his time,—viz. At what date did the Christ, the Divine principle, become united with Jesus, the human being? “At his baptism,” replied Theodotus.50 “Before his birth,” said the general voice of the Christians. We are disposed to think this was the obnoxious tenet which Victor construed into heresy; and if so, the strife had no bearing upon the doctrine of the personality of the Logos, which the pope and the heretic might both have rejected. Of the Unitarianism of that time, it was no essential feature to postpone till the baptism the heavenly element in Christ. We remember no reason for supposing that the Artemonites did so, though Theodotus did; and if they knew that the objection which had been fatal to him did not apply to them, their claim of ancient and orthodox sanction for what they held in common with him was not answered by pointing to his condemnation for what was special to himself. But is there, it will be asked, any evidence that the Roman Church attached importance to this particular ingredient of the Theodotian scheme, so that their bishop might feel impelled to visit it with ecclesiastical censure? We believe there is, and that too in the “Philosophumena.” In the author’s confession of faith occurs a passage which produces at first a strange impression upon a modern reader, and appears like a violence done to the Gospel history. It affirms that Christ passed through every stage of human life, that he might serve as the model to all. Nor is this idea a personal whim of the writer; but is borrowed from his master, Irenæus, who gives it in more detail, and winds it up with the assertion, that Christ lived to be fifty years old.51 Irenæus thus falsifies the history to make good the moral; our presbyter, by respecting the history, apparently invalidates the moral: for it can scarcely be said of a life closed after thirty-one or thirty-two years, that it supplies a rule πασα ἡλικιη; at least it would seem more natural to apologize for its premature termination, than to lay stress on its absolute completeness. The truth is, there was a certain, obnoxious tenet behind, which these writers were anxious to contradict, and which their assertion exactly meets,—viz. the very tenet of Theodotus, that the Divine nature did not unite itself with the Saviour till his baptism. Irenæus and his pupil could not endure this limitation of what was highest in Christ to the interval between his first public preaching and his crucifixion. They thought that in this way it was reduced to a mere official investiture, not integral to his being, but externally superinduced; and that such a conception deprived it of all its moral significance. The union of the Logos with our nature was not a provision for temporary inspiration or a forensic redemption; but was intended to mould a life and shape a personal existence, according to the immaculate ideal of humanity. To accomplish this intention it was necessary that the Logos should never be absent from any part of his earthly being; but should have claimed his person from the first, and by preoccupation have neutralized the action of the natural (or psychic) element, throughout all the years of his continuance among men. The anxiety of Irenæus’s school to put this interpretation on the manifestation of the Logos, their determination to distinguish it, on the one hand, from the mediate communication of prophets as an immediate presentation (αυτοψει φανερωθηναι), and, on the other, from the transient occupancy of a ready-made man, as a permanent and thorough-going incarnation (σαρκωθηναι in opposition to φαντασια or τροπη), is apparent in their whole language on this subject. In the Son, we are carried to the fresh fountain-head of every kind of perfection, and find the unspoiled ideal of heavenly and terrestrial natures. In one of the fragments of Hippolytus, published by Mai, and noticed in M. Bunsen’s Appendix, this notion is conveyed by the remark, that He is first-born of God’s own essence, that he may have precedence of angels; first-born of a virgin, that he may be a fresh-created Adam; first-born of death, that he might become the first fruits of our resurrection.52 This doctrine it is, we apprehend, which amplifies itself into the Irenæan statement, that the divine and ideal function of Christ coalesced with the historical throughout, so that to infants he was a consecrating infant; to little children, a consecrating child; to youth, a consecrating model of youth; and to elders, a still consecrating rule, not only by disclosure of truth, but by exhibiting the true type of their perfection.53 The teaching of Theodotus, that the heavenly εικων remained at a distance till the baptism, was directly contradictory of this favorite notion; and might well produce hostile excitement, and provoke condemnation, in a church where the Irenæan influence is known to have been powerful. The attitude that Victor assumed towards the Theodotians is thus perfectly compatible with Monarchian opinions, and with an attitude equally hostile, in the opposite direction, towards the advancing Trinitarian claims of a distinct personality for the Logos. Though only the one hostility is recorded of Victor, the other is ascribed, as we have seen, to his immediate successors, Zephyrinus and Callistus, who maintained that it was no other person than the Father that dwelt as the Logos in the Son. The facts taken together, and spreading as they do over the periods of three popes, afford undeniable traces of a struggle at the turn of the second century, between a prevalent but threatened Monarchianism, and a new doctrine of the Divine Personality of the Son.

After all, why is M. Bunsen so anxious to disprove the late appearance of the fourth Gospel? Did he value it chiefly as a biographical sketch, and depend upon it for concrete facts, a first-hand authentication of its contents would be of primary moment. But his interest in it is evidently speculative rather than historical, and centres upon its doctrinal thought, not on its narrative attestation; and especially singles out the proem as a condensed and perfect expression of Christian ontology. The book speaks to him, and finds him, out of its mystic spiritual depths; sanctifies his own philosophy; glorifies with an ideal haze the greatest reality of history; blends with melting tints the tenderness of the human, and the sublimity of the divine life; and presents the Holy Spirit as immanent in the souls of the faithful and the destinies of humanity. But its enunciation of great truths, its penetration to the still sanctuary of devout consciousness, will not cease to be facts, or become doubtful as merits, or be changed in their endearing power, by an alteration in the superscription or the date. These religious and philosophical features converse directly with Reason and Conscience, and have the same significance, whatever their critical history may be; and are not the less rich as inspirations from having passed for interpretation through more minds than one. There is neither common sense nor piety, as M. Bunsen himself, we feel certain, will allow, in the assumption that Revelation is necessarily most perfect at its source, and can only grow earthy and turbid as it flows. Were it something entirely foreign to the mind, capable of holding no thought in solution, but inevitably spoiled by every abrasion it effects of philosophy and feeling, this mechanical view would be correct. But if it be the intenser presence, the quickened perception of a Being absent from none; if it be the infinite original of which philosophy is the finite reflection; if thus it speaks, not in the unknown tongue of isolated ecstasy, but in the expressive music of our common consciousness and secret prayer;—then is it so little unnatural, so related to the constitution of our faculties, that the mind’s continuous reaction on it may bring it more clearly out; and, after being detained at first amid sluggish levels and unwholesome growths which mar its divine transparency, it may percolate through finer media, drop its accidental admixtures, and take up in each stratum of thought some elements given it by native affinity, and become more purely the spring of life in its descent than in its source. If, before the fourth Gospel was written, the figure of Christ, less close to the eye, was seen more in its relations to humanity and to God; if his deep hints, working in the experience of more than one generation, had expanded their marvellous contents; if, in a prolonged contact of his religion with Hellenism, elements had disclosed themselves of irresistible sympathy, and the first sharp boundary drawn by Jewish hands had melted away; if his concrete history itself was now subordinate to its ideal interpretation;—the book will present us still with a Christianity, not impoverished, but enriched. In proportion as its thoughts speak for themselves by their depth and beauty, may all anxiety cease about their external legitimation; their credentials become eternal instead of individual; and where the Father himself thus beareth witness, Christ needeth not the testimony of man. It cannot be, therefore, any religious issue that depends on the date of this Christian record; it cannot make truth, it can only awaken the mind to discern it; and whether it has this power or not, the mind can only report according to its consciousness of quickening light or stagnant darkness. The interest of this question cannot surely be more than a critical interest, to one who can feel and speak in this noble strain:—

“No divine authority is given to any set of men to make truth for mankind. The supreme judge is the Spirit in the Church, that is to say, in the universal body of men professing Christ. The universal conscience is God’s highest interpreter. If Christ speaks truth, his words must speak to the human reason and conscience, whenever and wherever they are preached: let them, therefore, be preached. If the Gospels contained inspired wisdom, they must themselves inspire with heavenly thoughts the conscientious inquirer and the serious thinker: let them, therefore, freely be made the object of inquiry and of thought. Scripture, to be believed true with full conviction, must be at one with reason: let it, therefore, be treated rationally. By taking this course, we shall not lose strength; but we shall gain a strength which no church ever had. There is strength in Christian discipline, if freely accepted by those who are to submit to it; there is strength in spiritual authority, if freely acknowledged by those who care for Christ; there is strength unto death in the enthusiasm of an unenlightened people, if sincere, and connected with lofty moral ideas. But there is no strength to be compared with that of a faith which identifies moral and intellectual conviction with religious belief, with that of an authority instituted by such a faith, and of a Christian life based upon it, and striving to Christianize this world of ours, for which Christianity was proclaimed. Let those who are sincere, but timid, look into their conscience, and ask themselves whether their timidity proceeds from faith, or whether it does not rather betray a want of faith. Europe is in a critical state, politically, ecclesiastically, socially. Where is the power able to reclaim a world, which, if it be faithless, is become so under untenable and ineffective ordinances,—which, if it is in a state of confusion, has become confused by those who have spiritually guided it? Armies may subdue liberty; but armies cannot conquer ideas: much less can Jesuits and Jesuitical principles restore religion, or superstition revive faith. I deny the prevalence of a destructive and irreligious spirit in the hearts of the immense majority of the people. I believe that the world wants, not less, but more religion. But however this be, I am firmly convinced that God governs the world, and that he governs it by the eternal ideas of truth and justice engraved on our conscience and reason; and I am sure that nations, who have conquered, or are conquering, civil liberty for themselves, will sooner or later as certainly demand liberty of religious thought, and that those whose fathers have victoriously acquired religious liberty will not fail to demand civil and political liberty also. With these ideas, and with the present irresistible power of communicating ideas, what can save us except religion, and therefore Christianity? But then it must be a Christianity based upon that which is eternally God’s own, and is as indestructible and as invincible as he is himself: it must be based upon Reason and Conscience, I mean reason spontaneously embracing the faith in Christ, and Christian faith feeling itself at one with reason and with the history of the world. Civilized Europe, as it is at present, will fall; or it will be pacified by this liberty, this reason, this faith. To prove that the cause of Protestantism in the nineteenth century is identical with the cause of Christianity, it is only necessary to attend to this fact; that they both must sink and fall, until they stand upon their indestructible ground, which, in my inmost conviction, is the real, genuine, original ground upon which Christ placed it. Let us, then, give up all notions of finding any other basis, all attempts to prop up faith by effete forms and outward things: let us cease to combat reason, whenever it contradicts conventional forms and formularies. We must take the ground pointed out by the Gospel, as well as by the history of Christianity. We may then hope to realize what Christ died for, to see the Church fulfil the high destinies of Christianity, and God’s will manifested by Christ to mankind, so as to make the kingdoms of this earth the kingdoms of the Most High.”—p. 172.

We have given our readers no conception of the variety and richness of M. Bunsen’s work; having scarcely passed beyond the limits of the first volume. It was impossible to pass by, without examination, the recovered monument of early Christianity, whence his materials and suggestions are primarily drawn; and it is equally impossible to pass beyond it, without entering on a field too wide to be surveyed. We can only record that, in the remaining volumes, which are, in fact, a series of separate productions, the early doctrine of the Eucharist is investigated, and the progress of its corruptions strikingly traced; the primitive system of ecclesiastical rules or canons, and the “Church-and-House Book,” or manual of instruction and piety in use among the ante-Nicene Christians, are carefully and laboriously restored; and genuine Liturgies of the first centuries are reproduced. In this arduous work of recovery, there is necessarily much need of critical tact, not to say much room for critical conjecture. But the one our author exercises with great felicity; and the other he takes all possible pains to reduce to its lowest amount by careful comparison of Syrian, Coptic, and Abyssinian texts. The general result is a truly interesting set of sketches for a picture of the early Church; which rises before us with no priestly pretensions, no scholastic creeds, no bibliolatry, dry and dead; but certainly with an aspect of genuine piety and affection, and with an air of mild authority over the whole of life, which are the more winning from the frightful corruption and dissolving civilization of the Old World around. That our author should be fascinated with the image he has re-created, and long to see it brought to life, in place of that body of death on which we hang the pomps and titles of our nominal Christianity, is not astonishing. But a greater change is needed—though a far less will be denied—than a return to the type of faith and worship in the second century. To destroy the fatal chasm between profession and conviction, and bring men to live fresh out of a real reverence instead of against a pretended or a fancied one, a greater latitude and flexibility must be given to the forms of spiritual culture than was needed in the ancient world. The unity of system which was once possible is unseasonable amid our growing varieties of condition and culture; and the methods which were natural among a people closely thrown together and constructing their life around the Church as a centre, would be highly artificial in a state of society in which the family is the real unit, and the congregation a precarious aggregate, of existence. Nothing, however, can be finer or more generous than the spirit of our author’s suggestions of reform; and we earnestly thank him for a profusion of pregnant thoughts and faithful warnings, the application of one half of which would change the fate of our churches,—the destiny of our nation,—the courses of the world.